Before Thanksgiving the California Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a 13-page letter to the City of Vallejo criticizing the Draft Environmental Impact Report on the deep water port called Vallejo Marine Terminal and the proposed cement factory tenant called Orcem (Orcem/VMT or applicant). As unpublished updates have been circulated among some of the interested parties by the applicant, the DOJ apparently has included some of those updates in their critique and therefore have referred to the application as a Draft Final Environmental Impact Report (DFEIR).
Deputy Attorney General Erin Ganahl wrote; “The DFEIR fails to adequately disclose, analyze, and mitigate the significant environmental impacts of the project; the EJA [Environmental Justice Analysis] improperly concludes that the project would not disproportionately impact low-income communities of color, and thus misleads decision makers and the public by minimizing the project's significant environmental justice concerns.”
In fact, the DOJ concludes that the DFEIR is so deficient that it violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The DOJ wrote “The DFEIR Fails to Adequately Consider the Project’s Environmental Setting and Cumulative Impacts”; “The Revised Air Quality Analysis is Flawed and Underestimates the Project’s Air Quality Impacts”; “The DFEIR’s Mitigation Measures for Other Project Impacts are Inadequate, Unlawfully Deferred, and Unenforceable”; and “The EJA’s DemographicAnalysis is Misleading”.
Most importantly, the DOJ verified the Sierra Club’s concerns regarding coal shipments. “The DFEIR fails to consider the potentially significant impacts that would occur if coal or petcoke were transported through the Terminal. The DFEIR states that the Terminal would not handle coal or any other petroleum-based products. But, the DFEIR does not point to any enforceable condition that would prevent the handling or transport of coal through the Terminal or guarantee that no coal could be transported through the Terminal.” Basically, the applicant is asking Vallejoans to trust them on a no coal through the terminal. This is very similar to the proposed terminal in Oakland where the developer promised no coal in recorded documents and as soon as the project was approved sold half of the development to coal interests in Utah.
Various entities within the Sierra Club including the Beyond Coal project; the National Clean Air Team; the Redwood Chapter and the Solano Group have all applauded the DOJ report. As Sierra Club members, we should all be proud of the efforts these members (and others) have done to protect the Bay from this project and protect the citizens of Vallejo.