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This EIR was required by CEQA to analyze significant, cumulative air pollution impacts of this subdivision's construction and occupancy, as well as the foreseeable air pollutant emissions from other known projects currently being proposed. It is not sufficient to only evaluate this Project's air emissions when our air will soon be degraded by other known pollutant sources. However, the EIR completely failed to include the cumulative air quality impacts to the Mt. Shasta City air basin from the proposed Nestle Bottling plant's heavy delivery trucks that will pass near and through Mt. Shasta City. Pacific Municipal Consultants also prepared the Draft EIR for that Nestle project, and should have known about that air pollution. That EIR predicted that roughly 85% of over 600 heavy truck trips per day would travel along Highway 89 arriving or departing from Nestle's plant. Roughly 15% of 600 trucks would travel northward through the City's limits. Roughly 70% of those 600 trucks per day would pass just south of the City's southern city boundary along Highway 89; the prevailing wind from the south would carry most of those nearby heavy truck emissions northward into the City of Mt. Shasta. The huge quantity of PM10, ozone and other air pollutant emissions from these diesel-fueled, heavy trucks will cumulatively degrade Mt. Shasta's air quality.
The EIR was also required to but failed to analyze the cumulative air quality impacts from a proposed wood-burning, heavy-truck shipping dependent, co-generation electric power plant project applied for by Roseburg Forest Products in 2006 in nearby Weed, California that will also contribute significant amounts of harmful wood smoke and diesel particulate emissions to the City of Mt. Shasta's shared airshed. Without such cumulative impact analysis, the City's approval of this Moss EIR violated CEQA. Agencies cannot evaluate individual projects in a vacuum, for such piecemeal analysis prevents them from creating effective mitigations
for all these projects so our air quality does not become incrementally polluted without forewarning. |
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