San Mateo County is the lead agency on this project. As stated in California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) Guidelines Section 15081.5 , it is the Lead Agency’s responsibility to prepare or have prepared the Environmental Impact Report. The County chose to hire Christopher A. Joseph and Associates (CAJA), an environmental consultant, to assist in the preparation of the Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and Final EIR, which contains the Draft EIR or a revised version of the Draft EIR, comments received during the Draft EIR comment period, and response to comments.
Last October, CAJA and their sub-consultants completed the Draft EIR, which contained over 2,000 pages of environmental analysis . Recently, the County put the CAJA contract on hold. To the best of our knowledge, this is due to contract issues between the County and CAJA.
CAJA had completed a significant portion of the Final EIR, having responded to about half of the letters on the Draft EIR, before the County discontinued using their services. The County will now work to finish the remainder of the response to comments as part of the Final EIR.
In a typical EIR process, the environmental consultant will seek information from the project’s engineer and then add, edit, or remove the information they receive in a manner they feel is appropriate. This is a fairly common practice in the EIR process. Regarding this project, Big Wave’s involvement in completing the Final EIR is very similar to its involvement when CAJA was still working for the County. Before CAJA’s contract was put on hold, CAJA and the County worked with Scott Holmes, our project engineer, to address technical comments and questions received from responsible agencies and members of the public. He will provide the same type of clarifications for the County with regard to the County’s preparation of the Final EIR.
With or without CAJA, the County has the responsibility to respond to comments and assemble the Final EIR. About half of the response to comments, work unique to the Final EIR, has already been completed by the EIR consultant. The County will finish the document, seeking the same level of input from Big Wave as CAJA would have.
Our primary concern is that the Environmental Impact Report is properly completed in accordance with CEQA. The use of a consultant to complete the Final EIR is not required by CEQA. While Big Wave will contribute draft responses to some comments and some organization of the document, the County will have final review and authority over every aspect of the final document, including the adequacy of the DEIR.
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