Level of Detail Adequate in High Speed Rail Authority’s Program EIR for Central Valley to Bay Area Rail Corridor

Town of Atherton v. California High-Speed Rail Authority(7/24/14, C070877)

The appellate court upheld the California High-Speed Rail Authority's Program EIR for the Central Valley to Bay Area portion of the route, concluding that (1) the Authority properly limited its environmental analysis to a program level when it deferred site-specific analysis of the vertical profile options for alignment, (2) the Town's experts could not show the Authority's revenue and ridership model was inadequate or unsupported, and (3) the Authority's Program EIR considered an adequate range of alternatives despite rejecting an alternative proposed by one expert consulting company.

Before reaching the CEQA issues in the case, the court rejected the Authority's argument that federal law, specifically the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act (ICCTA), preempted the California Environmental Quality Act litigation. The Authority contended that a federal board, the Surface Transportation Board, had recently assumed jurisdiction over California's high-speed rail project, determining it would be part of the interstate rail network governed by the ICCTA. However, the court found the specific circumstances of the case fell within the market participation exception to federal preemption because the State of California, rather than a private company, was constructing the rail line financed by state bonds approved by Proposition 1A which included compliance with CEQA as a feature of the high-speed rail.

On the CEQA issues, the Town first asserted that the Authority's revised final Program EIR provided an inadequate analysis of the vertical profile options for alignment. The Authority explained that the revised final Program EIR was a first-tier program EIR/EIS intended to contain only a general discussion of the project's impacts relating to aesthetics, visual resources, noise, and vibration. The Authority began the second-tier project-level EIR to provide for more detailed, site-specific impacts and as a result issued a Supplemental Alternatives Analysis Report (SAAR), which concluded that an aerial viaduct (elevated structure) was the only feasible alignment for a portion of the project. While the SAAR's conclusion resulted from a more in depth project-level analysis, it was issued approximately one month before final certification of the Program EIR. The Town argued that the necessity of the aerial viaduct was foreseeable and thus should have been included in the...