The wildly successful Harry Potter books and movies hit the market more than 10 years ago, with the last movie in the series released in 2009. Universal Studios acquired the right to develop a Harry Potter theme park ride and related attractions at both its Orlando and Los Angeles amusement parks. The Orlando Harry Potter theme park opened in 2010, and instantly became a top-ranked tourist attraction that helped sustain visitation during the recession. The Los Angeles Harry Potter theme park had a very different adventure: as an integral component of the Universal Studio “Evolution Plan” for the 397-acre studio and amusement park campus, the project first went through nearly a decade of administrative processing, including CEQA studies, and an extensive community outreach process that eventually enlisted 7,500 active supporters.242 The project was designed to include the Harry Potter ride and other amusement park upgrades, renovated movie and television production facilities and offices for NBCUniversal studios, and 3,000 higher-density,
Clean and green technology companies are not the only major employment centers targeted by CEQA. Another signature California industry, entertainment, is likewise targeted by a range of CEQA lawsuits. transit-oriented residential units in an urbanized area of Los Angeles County.243 Bowing to intense neighborhood opposition to higherdensity housing, the project’s residential component was ultimately dropped (notwithstanding acute housing needs and an affordability crisis in Los Angeles and other parts of Coastal California),244 and the project was finally approved in 2013.245 The CEQA lawsuit challenge was filed in 2014, when neighbors who had successfully demanded that park-related traffic be routed away from their neighborhood onto a new freeway interchange sued to stop the closure of the substandard former interchange as part of the freeway improvements.246 California still does not have a Harry Potter ride – while Florida has reaped five years of Harry Potter jobs and tourism dollars. The Los Angeles Universal Studio project was projected to create 30,000 permanent jobs.247 Farther north, in the land of Star Wars, after nearly 10 years George Lucas had finally won approval in 1996 for a long-range Master Plan for the Grady campus in Marin County that hosts LucasFilms, Industrial Light and Magic, and other game design and related Lucas 60 | Copyright © 2015 Holland & Knight LLP All Rights Reserved
enterprises. After many more years of post-approval processing, in 2012, Lucas was on the verge of receiving final approvals to actually construct just a fraction of the development previously approved in 1996 (by which time he had also agreed to scale back the approved project and instead preserve more open space and restore a creek). Neighbors in notoriously anti-growth Marin County were having none of it, even neighbors who had moved in after the 1996 “vested” approval for the campus Master Plan. Lucas was likewise fed up, and on the eve of project approval – facing the certainty of neighbor CEQA lawsuits, and the uncertainty of the timing and outcome that comes with CEQA lawsuits – he withdrew his application after having spent millions of dollars and many years attempting to complete the two full cycles of CEQA processing required by Marin County.248 Lucas is one of the county’s very few large employers (and corporate taxpayers), but a handful of neighbors could invest a few thousand dollars in a CEQA lawsuit guaranteed to buy years of litigation uncertainty. The final score: neighbors win, Marin (and California) loses 800 construction and permanent jobs, hundreds of millions in tax revenues and other indirect economic benefits, and more than $50 million of environmental restoration work planned for the 78% of the campus proposed for permanent open space preservation.249 A new skirmish in this neighbor dispute was initiated in early 2015, when Lucas announced he would seek approval to build quality affordable housing in Marin (an extremely high-cost, low-supply housing market) – without seeking scarce federal and state affordable housing funding.250 His wealthy neighbors immediately voiced their vehement opposition to this new project as well, and the affordable housing proposal has also been abandoned.
2. CEQA and Small Business The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that small businesses have created about 75% of the net new jobs created in the economy.251 CEQA litigation abusers, particularly NIMBYs and competitors, have found small business to be an easy target. One well-reported story involves Moe’s Gas Station, a small independent station operating next to a freeway interchange in the heart of Silicon Valley. Moe’s decided to add a new pump island (three new gas dispensers), and Moe’s neighbor – a competing small gas station – used aggressive CEQA tactics to try to derail Moe’s.252 The competitor first unsuccessfully tried to block the project as part of the city’s administrative review and approval process, which included a CEQA study and approval of a “Negative Declaration” confirming that the project would cause no significant adverse impacts. The majority of Negative Declarations fail in reported appellate court cases examined over a 15-year study period,253 and sure enough, Moe’s competitor won its CEQA lawsuit challenge to