I’ve been pointing this out for a long time now, but it bears repeating: all of the grand schemes for building “green energy” projects: solar farms, windmills, new transformer sites, power lines to bring off shore and wind power from where it’s generated to where it’s needed, etc. will be and are being blocked by other groups, equally fanatical, who oppose them. The story below actually involves, not a green advocate but two adjoining property owners with their own private agendas, but it’s a perfect illustration of how the environmental laws enacted over the past decades provide opponents the legal warfare tools to obstruct, delay, and block energy projects.
Have I mentioned the mines that will be needed to provide the minerals and ores necessary to build a new power infrastructure, let alone Trump’s plans to revive traditional ones? Forget them
The Alameda Food Bank and the environmental startup Natel Energy would seem to have little in common.
One supplies grains and proteins and vegetables each week to about 1,200 Alameda households. The other has come up with new “fish safe” hydropower turbines that don’t kill or maim the eels and trout and catfish that swim through their blades.
But in the past two weeks [this rticle is from September 2024] the two organizations, both located among the eclectic and vibrant evolving neighborhood at the former Naval Air Station Alameda, were delivered similar bad news: lawsuits challenging plans to expand their operations.
Behind the lawsuits are two longtime Alameda residents, Building 43 Winery owner Tod Hickman and Shelby Sheehan, a former Alameda Point resident involved in a rent dispute with the city. Using similar language, both lawsuits say the city violated state law by not requiring the food bank and Natel to complete full studies on how the projects would impact the environment.
“Critics say the lawsuits are extreme examples of how a couple of residents can weaponize the state’s well-intentioned California Environmental Quality Act law, known as CEQA, to block developments.”
“Who attacks a food bank?” said Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft. “They are using CEQA law and the judicial process to attack an absolutely essential service and an important environmental business. If they get away with this, what will come next?”
On a recent Tuesday, Alameda Food Bank Executive Director Teale Harden gave a tour of the nonprofit’s current home at 650 West Ranger. The building, a single cavernous warehouse, has no place for the food bank’s 1,200 weekly customers to wait, no offices in which to conduct business, inadequate refrigeration and nowhere for the 500 volunteers to take a break. Rain blows in through the roll-up doors in the winter.
“We make a lot of effort to provide food in a respectful and dignified way, and that’s not possible here,” Harden said. “This building wasn’t designed to have people in it.”
As an alternative, the food bank purchased a smaller 5,000-square-foot building across the street on Ranger Avenue for $3 million and won city approval to expand it with a prefabricated 10,000-square-foot warehouse with walk-in refrigeration and plenty of space for food storage. Demolition of the existing building has already started, and the food bank was planning to be in the new facility by June. The lawsuit may make that impossible.
“It’s a very, very fast timeline, which is why this is so frustrating and urgent,” Harden said. “We don’t have any wiggle room. If anything gets delayed, we are pushing into time that we don’t really have.”
A demolition crew works outside 677 W. Ranger Ave, a building where the Alameda Food Bank wants to move to. But the community food bank’s move is on hold after neighbors sued using the California Environmental Quality Act.
Both Hickman and Sheehan are well known around the neighborhood. Sheehan was evicted from a city-owned property after she stopped paying rent in 2020 over a dispute, according to court records. Hickman regularly speaks at City Council meetings and has been critical of the way the city has handled the redevelopment of the base. In a 2022 Chronicle story Hickman complained that the neighborhood was “in a state of disrepair.”
Hickman, on Friday, told the Chronicle he is a supporter of both Natel and the food bank but is objecting to what he characterized as the city’s “criminal violation of the second most important law after the First Amendment.”
“We are not suing anyone but the city of Alameda,” Hickman said. “The city did not follow CEQA law by issuing fraudulent notices of exemption.”
He said he plans on filing three more CEQA lawsuits in Alameda Point in the next 30 days, despite the fact that his targeting the food bank has generated “hundreds” of one-star reviews of his winery on social media. “I’m going to have to start going to the food bank, myself, because they have done a good job of destroying my business.”
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In the lawsuit, Hickman and Sheehan argue that the warehouse would destroy a portion of “an in-use, historic parking lot” and called the proposed 35-foot tall prefabricated building “historically-offensive.” They said the city violated CEQA laws by not analyzing the project for its impacts on “noise, historic resources, water and quality, impacts to adjacent uses, traffic, and safety.” Hickman has also argued in public testimony that the food bank would be better off at a different location “down the road.”
….
Gregor Cadman, chief operating officer of Natel Energy, says the turbine company’s expansion is necessary to close two contracts “critical to the continuation of our business.”
Natel, which employs 33 people, developed its blunt-bladed turbines in the warehouse. Just outside the building’s roll-up doors is a “pumped hydraulic test facility,” a network of white tubes connected to a tank of water. It’s about the size of a play structure at a playground.
“It’s pushing flow through the turbine so we know how much hydraulic power is going into the turbine and how much electrical power is coming out,” said Gregor Cadman, the company’s chief operating officer.
Cadman said the expanded testing equipment, which will not increase the height of the current facility, is needed to close two contracts “critical to the continuation of our business.”
Kate Stirr, vice president of external affairs for Natel, noted the irony of using a law meant to protect the environment to disrupt a business doing “critical environmental protection work.”
“We need to complete the expansion in order to scale this technology up,” she said. “The impact it could have on the global hydro power fleet is profound. It would transform the current fleet that kills fish into a hydro fleet that still provides the renewal energy we need … but to also reverse the biodiversity decline that we are seeing in fresh water fisheries.”
In the CEQA challenge, Hickman and Sheehan call Natel’s proposed expansion “the most recent egregious example of complete disregard for environmental and zoning regulations” at Alameda Point.
They say the existing test equipment has caused “long term obstruction of scenic and historic vistas, violation of the Public Trust, degradation of the historic character of the District, and unknown negative impacts to the endangered California least tern, noise, water, and air quality and health effects and others that are unknown because they have not been disclosed or evaluated.”
….“Our neighbor across the street is motivated by the financial interest of his business,” Cadman said. “I can appreciate that. If we didn’t have to have the equipment here we would have it elsewhere, but due to fish and wildlife restriction with the least tern colony we can’t have the equipment behind the building.”
Cadman said the use of CEQA to block Alameda Point redevelopment projects “sets a concerning precedent.”
“I’m not sure how much further this could go. It could affect the city’s ability to have a healthy civic and economic development path,” he said.
