A property owner’s court petition to allow a proposed 259-unit Seaside Ridge project on Del Mar’s north bluff now faces a motion to dismiss by the city, which will be heard June 13 in San Diego County Superior Court.
Ralph Hicks, a Del Mar city attorney, said May 15 the city would be filing the motion imminently but declined further comment. The hearing on the petition itself, which had been scheduled for June 13, is now Aug. 1, pending the outcome of the motion to dismiss.
Judge Wendy M. Behan scheduled the new hearing dates last month, and issued a set of deadlines for both sides to submit their opening briefs and files for the case’s istrative record.
Recent court records show that the city and project applicant have been at odds over the contents of the case’s istrative record, which contains all relevant development applications, planning documents, emails and other files.
The dispute over Seaside Ridge dates back to October 2022, when property owner Carol Lazier submitted the application. Of the 259 proposed units on the blufftop property at the city’s northern border, 42 would be for lower-income tenants.
The city of Del Mar’s planning department rejected the application as incomplete because Lazier did not also initiate the process of amending the city’s Local Coastal Program to make the project eligible under the California Coastal Act.
Lazier argues that Seaside Ridge should be approved under the Builder’s Remedy, a state law that can supersede local zoning and allow for streamlined approvals if a development application is submitted to a city that does not have a certified housing element. Del Mar submitted its proposed housing element, which shows how the city will zone for a state-mandated 175 new housing units, to the California Department of Housing and Community Development in 2021. Due to a series of revisions requested by HCD, it wasn’t approved until May 2023, several months after the Seaside Ridge application.
Lazier resubmitted the Seaside Ridge application two more times over the next year but the city continued to reject it as incomplete, leading to the court petition in February 2024.
Both sides agreed last year to delay the hearing date until 2025 so they could monitor the outcome of a similar dispute in the wealthy Los Angeles County suburb of La Cañada Flintridge.
In La Cañada, the city had rejected a 77,000 square-foot mixed-use development, but a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge later ruled it could proceed under the Builder’s Remedy. The city took the case to the Court of Appeal, then announced in March it planned to withdraw because “the financial cost associated with the appeals process outweighs the potential outcomes of further litigation.”
In April, before the hearing date for the Seaside Ridge petition was pushed back from June 13, attorneys for Lazier filed an ex parte application for the court to formally set deadlines to file briefs and submit all relevant records. The application alleged that the city “has fully ignored Petitioner’s repeated entreaties” to set the schedule themselves.
“This failure to engage in any meaningful negotiations with Petitioner threaten to delay the previously set hearing date, which was already continued as a direct result of the City’s failure to participate in this litigation,” Whitney Hodges, Lazier’s attorney, wrote in the ex parte application.
Another attorney for Del Mar, William Pate, wrote in opposition to the ex parte application that the petitioner had “elected to self-prepare an istrative record that was replete with countless problems.”
“Just last week Petitioner finally submitted a record that did not contain several hundred pages of ADU applications, single residential applications, newspaper articles and miscellaneous unrelated documents,” Pate wrote in April. “The City has not had time to review the most recent record for completeness and whether numerous requests to properly augment the record have been honored.”
Following an April 9 hearing, the judge set June 13 as the hearing date for the city’s motion to dismiss, followed by deadlines through June and July for briefs and files to be submitted ahead of the Aug. 1 hearing on the petition.
Seaside Ridge spokesperson Darren Pudgil questioned the timeliness of the motion to dismiss and called it “yet another delay tactic on the part of the city, which does nothing but waste even more taxpayer money.”
“Surprisingly, the city must not have paid much attention to what took place in La Cañada Flintridge recently involving a similar lawsuit,” he said in a statement. “Not only did the judge there rule against the city’s motion to dismiss, he ruled in favor of the plaintiff and the application of the same laws that are at issue in our litigation. The city of Del Mar needs to come to its senses and realize that the law is not on their side.”
