Sunrise Powerlink opponents suing feds; Foes claim agencies rushed to OK project

Federal agencies cut corners and violated environmental laws in approving San Diego Gas & Electric Co.'s Sunrise Powerlink, opponents of the big power line claimed yesterday in a lawsuit.

They are asking a federal judge in Sacramento to keep construction of the proposed transmission line from the Imperial Valley to San Diego from starting until a new review of the project is completed.

"The fundamental problem here is that the Bureau of Land Management jumped the gun in rushing to approve this project, hours before the Obama administration was sworn in," said Stephan Volker, a lawyer for Sunrise opponents.

He said the federal officials didn't wait, as required by law, for detailed studies of the project's impact on "threatened and endangered species and other critical wild-land resources."

A BLM spokesman in Riverside didn't not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries.

A Carlsbad-based spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which was also named in the lawsuit, said she couldn't comment on pending litigation but that the agency did what was required to find that the project "would not jeopardize the continued existence of the species that were covered."

SDG&E called the lawsuit groundless. It said it's confident that the project was properly approved and that it expects to get the final go-ahead in time to break ground in June.

A second lawsuit challenging approval of the power line by the California Public Utilities Commission is pending before a state appeals court in San Diego.

Also, the U.S. Forest Service has yet to give SDG&E permission to build in the Cleveland National Forest, saying it needs more information, and that it may wait to see how the legal challenges turn out.

SDG&E and its backers say the 123-mile transmission line is needed to bring renewable energy to San Diego from the Imperial Valley, to increase reliability and to lower costs.

Opponents say those goals can be met without the $1.9 billion line by generating more power in San Diego, implementing conservation measures and beefing up existing power lines.

If successful in challenging federal approval of the project, the lawsuit will also halt a proposed wind farm on federal, state, tribal and private lands in the McCain Valley, in the far southeastern corner of San Diego County.

The lawsuit concerns several actions by the BLM and the Fish & Wildlife Service from 2007 to 2009 that paved the way for approval of the power line.

The BLM in 2007 proposed a "resource management plan" for future uses of 160 square miles of federal land in San Diego County, areas including "mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers and high desert."

That plan was tweaked to take into account public comments during an environmental review process. But then it was "abruptly hijacked" to accommodate Sunrise, power-line opponents claim in their lawsuit.

The plan essentially changed zoning, opening vast areas to energy development, they said.

The changed plan modified projected uses so much that a new environmental review should have been done, opponents said. Instead, federal officials relied on the comments and studies related to the old plan, they said.

At the same time, the BLM considered Sunrise unrelated to its changed land-use plan, denying the public and decision-makers "an accurate understanding of the timing and likely intensity of energy development in the McCain Valley and other sensitive areas," the opponents said in their lawsuit.

That, they said, is a violation of federal law.

In addition, most of the attention on the Sunrise approval focused on a northern route at a time when SDG&E was saying a route through East County wasn't feasible, they said.

Because the approvals didn't consider what they should have, they were "arbitrary and capricious," they said.

Judges don't like to second-guess the actions of federal agencies, so the standard they follow is a difficult one to meet. They have to find that agencies had no evidence on which to make their decisions, not that they made the wrong ones.

Boulevard resident Donna Tisdale, one of the plaintiffs and a vocal opponents of power projects in her part of the county, said she's confident that the BLM and the Fish & Wildlife Service didn't consider everything they should have.

"They put the cart before the horse," Tisdale said. "They did not follow the process."

But SDG&E points to an environmental review that includes 11,000 pages of studies, comments and responses.

"We are confident that the Bureau of Land Management made its decisions on a voluminous and complete record in the proceedings, and will successfully defend (itself against) this latest legal protest," said SDG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Briscoe.