First District Reverses Earlier Decision in Berkeley Hillside Case
Description
Reversing itself on remand, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled in the Berkeley Hillside case that the proposed home of computer pioneer Mitch Kapor and his wife does not, in and of itself, represent an "unusual circumstances" under the CEQA Guidelines and therefore the City of Berkeley acted properly in applying a CEQA exemption to the project.
In so doing, the court did not need to move on to the second half of the analysis laid out earlier this year by the California Supreme Court in the appeal of the Berkeley Hillside case, Berkeley Hillside Preservation v. City of Berkeley (2015) 60 Cal.4th 1086, which was decided in May.