Despite years of legal wrangling and appeals, the Santa Clarita City Council seems to have exhausted all its efforts to take down more than 6,000 solar panels on the hillside facing Soledad Canyon Road in Canyon Country, following Tuesday’s closed session meeting.
After the brief 4:30 p.m. closed-door discussion behind Council Chambers prior to the council’s 5 p.m. public meeting, City Attorney Joe Montes reported there was no action taken.
The City Council called the special meeting to discuss the lawsuit after a three-judge panel for the 2nd District in the Court of Appeal of the state of California found that 99.8% of the panels were not an abatable nuisance, which was the original ruling of the L.A. Superior Court Judge Steven Pfahler.
He ruled that while the panels were an abatable nuisance, a legal principle known as estoppel applied, with the practical outcome being if the city wanted the property destroyed, it would have to compensate the owner, a cost estimated at about $5 million.
Last week, the court reversed the nuisance finding, which also meant the city could only have 0.2% of the panels taken down.
Kerry Seidenglanz, the property’s owner, said he planned to file a permit request to the city for the remaining 0.2% of the panels.
When asked about the possibility of an appeal, Montes said he was not able to speak to any details of the discussion or any instructions from the City Council, only as to whether the discussion resulted in any action taken by the council. There was none.
Santa Clarita Mayor Cameron Smyth recalled the solar panel issue being one of the first he tackled after he was reelected to the council in 2016.
“Personally, I’m very disappointed with the appellate court’s ruling. This is an issue that was one of the first actions I voted on when I came back to the council in 2017, so it’s been a long fight,” Smyth said.
He also declined to discuss the closed-session discussion, but acknowledged the city acts on legal advice from counsel that looks at things like the likelihood of a successful appeal.
“This is another example of jurisdictions losing oversight to the state on land issues,” said Smyth, who has registered similar concerns over changes in the Legislature with respect to local control for housing developments.
“And if I felt there was an opportunity to pursue this further and to have the appellate court ruling’s overturned, I think I would be willing to pursue this,” he said. “From what I see, it would be a losing venture with the only result of costing more taxpayer dollars.”
Each side was ordered to pay its own legal fees in the appellate court’s opinion.
City officials said Tuesday that the cost of the lawsuit for Santa Clarita so far had been $1.6 million in legal fees.
