Lake County - Win in Appeals Court

A California state appeals court has issued another blow to plans for a luxury resort on 16,000 acres of undeveloped land in Lake County.

“A lot of people are wishing and hoping that wildfire risk wasn’t the new reality and haven’t quite adapted to the fact that it is,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office joined private environmental organizations in two wildfire lawsuits in San Diego County, as well as the challenge in Lake County. Developers “...are building projects based on planning and thinking that was cemented and used well before wildfire risk became so prevalent and so common and so real,” he said.

“The developers should have considered how many more people would be trying to escape during a wildfire,” Judge J. David Markham wrote in the Guenoc Valley case. “The additional people competing for the same limited routes can cause congestion and delay in evacuation, resulting in increased wildfire-related deaths.”