Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, Creative Commons usage, by Tracey Adams

CLAWS says NO to Diablo

Committees for Land, Air, Water and Species (CLAWS) signed on to the letter sent by Jane Swanson of Mothers for Peace, along with 66 other groups, to reiterate that the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant must be closed, on schedule and as planned. It's overdue and seriously unsafe. 

We were delighted to see the media release sent by Mothers for Peace get picked up, with features in the New York Times as well as Associated Press. Here's the news:

67 Organizations Push Back

Against Efforts to Extend Operation

of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant 

In response to Governor Newsom’s suggestion to extend the operating life of Diablo Canyon nuclear facility beyond its planned closure dates of 2024 and 2025, 67 organizations from across the country sent him a letter of protest on May 17, 2022.

Jane Swanson of Mothers for Peace states, “There is nothing smart about continuing to operate Diablo Canyon beyond its current licenses. It is old, dirty, dangerous, and expensive! Let’s invest California’s surplus money in clean and safe energy resources, conservation, and efficiency.”

Santa Barbara County: how will it be with Hoop Houses?

CLAWS has recently taken action to promote a reasoned and appropriate program for managing agricultural hoop houses in Santa Barbara County

The use of hoop houses for agricultural operations in Santa Barbara County has been increasing substantially in recent years. Hoop Houses offer potential benefits of reduced water use, reduced or avoided pesticide use, improvement in worker conditions and increased agricultural productivity, but have a significant aesthetic impact when large areas are covered and generate large volumes of plastic waste. When abandoned in place, hoop houses contribute to litter as the plastic degrades and is blown off-site. CLAWS believes hoop houses offer benefits but have impacts, and as such, should be subject to standards for their use, and, when they can cause significant impacts, be subject to a reasonable regulatory system administered by the County.

Please submit a comment to CalTrans

The deadline to submit a comment on Caltrans’ draft revised environmental impact report on the Highway 101 widening project is this Tuesday, January 31. Click here to go to CLAWS’ comment page and submit your comment directly and automatically to Caltrans.

The Highway 101 widening project will have lasting and irrevocable impacts on the South Coast of Santa Barbara County. Caltrans has failed miserably to disclose and describe the project’s impacts, despite CEQA’s clear legal requirements and Judge Anderle’s direction in his December 2015 ruling. 

Additional points to make in your comments to Caltrans:

Don’t Piecemeal” the environmental analysis - Include all 101 Corridor Improvements in the EIR

• There are three intersection improvements that are required for the Project, but are being processed “parallel” with the 101 widening, including improvements to the railroad bridge at Cabrillo Blvd/Los Patos Rd, to allow bikes and pedestrians to travel safely in the area, and a roundabout at Olive Mill Rd. and improvements to San Ysidro Rd. to prevent traffic from backing up onto the 101. 
• CEQA prohibits “piecemealing” of a large project into a series of smaller projects to show less impact
• The EIR must analyze the impacts of these “parallel projects” in the EIR to ensure that all adverse environmental impacts are analyzed and mitigated comprehensively.  
• Caltrans’ piecemealing of the project and its analysis has allowed the EIR to overlook significant safety impacts to pedestrians and bicyclists, backup of stopped cars onto the 101 travel lanes, and resulted in local jurisdictions having to pay to mitigate project impacts that Caltrans should be responsible for.

Use Local CEQA Thresholds to fully disclose impacts from increased intersection delays

• Caltrans uses an arbitrary CEQA threshold (that triggers a significant impact which must be mitigated) that minimizes the significance of Project impacts from intersection delay. The EIR should evaluate impact significance using established thresholds, which show that the Project will cause significant impacts at many more intersections. 
• Flaws in the EIR’s analysis of complex intersections mask severe impacts including interchanges and downstream intersections reaching gridlock and queuing back onto the freeway. The analysis must be corrected, significant impacts recognized, and additional mitigation measures and/or alternatives identified. 
• The EIR ignores unacceptable safety impacts to pedestrians and bicyclists caused by increased intersection delays and proposed mitigations to reduce vehicle delays. The EIR must identify, analyze, and mitigate or avoid these significant public safety impacts.
• The EIR fails to address inconsistencies with local planning documents, including policies protecting safe pedestrian and bicycle routes and access to the coast. Policy conflicts are created at several impacted intersections that must be identified as significant impacts, analyzed, and mitigated. This is especially critical because local jurisdictions must apply their own policies when reviewing permits required to implement the Project, and will rely on the EIR during that permit review. 

 Adequately mitigate the Project’s impacts

• The EIR does not show that the proposed mitigation measures will effectively reduce impacts, or evaluate whether they may cause additional impacts. This analysis must occur in a revised EIR. 
• Because the EIR does not identify significant impacts to pedestrian and bicycle safety, it also fails to mitigate these impacts. The EIR must be revised to recognize and fully mitigate significant pedestrian and bicycle safety impacts. 
• Caltrans proposes to fund only a tiny fraction of the cost of the required improvements to local intersections. To ensure that required mitigation is in place before the Project is constructed, Caltrans must commit to funding a much higher levels of funding.
• The “mitigation strategy” is not fully identified in the EIR, but is improperly deferred to “further coordination with the local jurisdictions”. Specific information about infrastructure improvements must be circulated to the public to review in a revised EIR.

 Accurately assess cumulative impacts 

• Cumulative impacts of the Project were substantially understated, because the EIR assumed all required mitigations for Project-specific impacts would be in place, even though new evidence shows this is unlikely. The EIR assumed that all mitigation projects would be funded largely by local jurisdictions, and that the “parallel projects” including improvements at Cabrillo/Los Patos, Olive Mill, and San Ysidro, and four daily commuter rail trips will be in place.

• To avoid the likely scenario that these improvements are not in place by 2040 and intersection and mainline ensues, Caltrans must ensure that the required mitigation and parallel projects, including commuter rail, are all funded and implemented concurrently with the highway widening Project.

Recirculate another draft EIR for public comment

• Because of the substantial errors and omissions in the revised draft EIR, it does not fulfill its informational function. 
• Unless a revised EIR is recirculated for an additional review period, the public and responsible agencies cannot meaningfully comment on the Project’s impacts and ways to feasibly mitigate or avoid those impacts.  

JUDGE REJECTS 101 WIDENING PROJECT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT

Committees for Land, Air, Water and Species

The $435M 101 Widening Project is the largest public works project in recent County history, and will have a significant impact on the future face of the South Coast. Caltrans prepared an EIR that concluded there would be no significant impacts from the project, thus there was no need to avoid or mitigate the project’s impacts. Caltrans’ own traffic studies, however, found that the project would directly cause excessive congestion at nine intersections and cumulatively impact fifteen intersections from Carpinteria to Goleta. This project-induced congestion would exceeds Caltrans’ own thresholds of significance for the identification of significant impacts, and yet Caltrans failed to address the issue in its draft EIR.

The City of Santa Barbara would experience the greatest number of significantly impacted intersections. According to Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) correspondence, local agencies tally the cost of improving some of the intersections to accommodate project impacts at $110M.

Judge Anderle ruled that the EIR’s flawed analysis of traffic impacts was “an abdication of Caltrans’ responsibility.” His ruling explained that, in applying a flawed analysis that “categorically ignored potentially significant intersection impacts and designated them “tradeoffs” for project benefits, Caltrans simply erased [the impacts] from existence, rather than truly evaluating intersection impacts”. The EIR “utterly failed in its informational function.” [Quotes from pages 34-35 of the “Excerpted Ruling”.]