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A second lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Action (CEQA) was filed on Friday to challenge the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR), prepared by the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) for its 2021 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), effective until 2036-37, and for two construction projects located in different parts of Berkeley: Helen Diller Anchor House (Anchor), a mixed use 16-story high-rise, and the proposed People’s Park project, a group of buildings including a 17-story mixed use high-rise.. The plaintiff organization, Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan, seeks an order setting aside the certification of the FEIR and all of the University of California Regents’ (Regents) approvals for the Project. 

The plaintiff alleges that “[t]he FEIR fails to comply with the informational requirements of CEQA, caused in great part by UCB’s decision to draft an EIR that is at once underinclusive – insofar as it fails to address the proposed population increase – and over-inclusive – insofar as it shoves two construction projects into the EIR for the LRDP instead of first preparing an EIR for the LRDP and then later “tiering off” that EIR for the Park and Anchor projects. The result is an unintelligible and legally inadequate EIR that fails to include necessary and legally required baseline data and substitutes unsupported summary conclusions for meaningful discussion. “ 

The whole complaint can be read here.