What's at stake:
A major lawsuit that could impact the public health of the San Joaquin Valley was thrown out by a local judge.
His reasoning is in dispute -- even with his previous ruling on the same issue.
On the coast of Monterey in the early 1990s, residents of Carmel-by-the-Sea went to federal court to stop Caltrans from building a freeway through Hatton Canyon, a stretch of wetlands and rare Monterey pines just east of town. Caltrans’ plan called for a new bridge over the Carmel River, two new interchanges, and a widening of the road into Carmel Valley, where residential subdivisions were spreading fast. The residents’ lawyers argued that Caltrans had failed to analyze how the freeway would stimulate more sprawl across the wetlands.
The residents filed their case in federal court, alleging violations of both California’s environmental law, CEQA, and its federal counterpart, NEPA. The residents ended up stopping the project, after the federal Ninth Circuit court ruled Caltrans had failed to account for future subdivisions that, relying on the new freeway access, could be built near the wetlands. After the case, the project was defunded by the Transportation Agency for Monterey County. Today, Hatton Canyon is a protected state park.
Three decades later, a group of south Fresno residents did the same thing as the Carmel residents — alleging the same failures against Caltrans and filing the same claims in the same level of federal court. Their case revolved around the same core question: whether Caltrans should have analyzed new development, in Fresno’s case — a new industrial park — that would crop up around the upgraded American and North Avenue interchanges on Highway 99.
Caltrans’ project in south Fresno could add millions of truck trips annually to Fresno, a March 2023 Fresnoland investigation revealed. According to scientists, expanding Highway 99 would have region-shaping implications, and worsen Fresno’s air quality, some of the worst air in America.
Earlier this month, Fresno County Jude Geoffrey D. Wilson threw out the residents’ case. He faulted the community groups for doing what, 30 years earlier, the Carmel residents had done — filing their state claims in federal court. He called the Fresno groups’ federal filing “not objectively reasonable.”
Now, major questions about Caltrans won’t be answered by a court anytime soon. That includes concerns that Wilson himself identified earlier this year — about Caltrans’ failure to study the health impacts on the young people awaiting trial and serving sentences at the 1,400-bed juvenile facility 100 yards from the project. As Fresnoland has previously reported, Caltrans officials met with Fresno County planners in September 2021 to discuss a proposed 3,000-acre industrial park while the agency was still preparing its environmental review — and then left the industrial park out of the agency’s environmental documents entirely.
Friends of Calwa and Fresno Building Healthy Communities, the original plaintiffs in the case, are weighing an appeal. They think the judge gave them an unfair ruling.
“It’s such a shame,” said Sandra Celedon, president and CEO of Fresno Building Healthy Communities, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit. (Celedon is also running for California State Assembly.)
“It’s business-as-usual for Fresno.”
Caltrans did not respond to a request for comment.
A tale of two cities, highway lawsuit edition
When a Caltrans project is subject to both CEQA and its federal counterpart, NEPA — as both the Carmel and South Fresno projects were — community groups have long filed the two claims together in a single federal lawsuit. Caltrans has defended CEQA claims in federal court in highway cases going back to the 1970s — including the Carmel case — without raising sovereign immunity, a term used to describe the protections some agencies receive from being sued. And in the Fresno case, it spent months signaling it would do so again.
In four meet-and-confers between April and July 2023, according to court records, Caltrans discussed preparing a joint administrative record to litigate the CEQA and NEPA claims together. Even after raising the possibility of invoking immunity on July 20, Caltrans told the groups it was considering waiving immunity and asked them to draft a waiver proposal.
Then, Caltrans reversed course.
On Aug. 21, 2023, the agency moved to dismiss the CEQA claims, invoking its constitutional immunity under the Eleventh Amendment. Refiling in state court should have been a simple matter — California courts have long allowed plaintiffs to refile state claims in state court after a federal court declines jurisdiction, even after the statute of limitations has ostensibly passed.
In Friends of Mammoth, the foundational 1972 CEQA case, the state Supreme Court allowed a refiling that came two days after the 30-day filing deadline. The court ruled that throwing out the case was against the spirit of the law: a “myopic reading” of the statute of limitations that “denied a hearing on the merits.” In a 2009 case called Tarkington, a California appeals court reaffirmed the principle, finding that what matters is whether the plaintiff refiled promptly and reasonably — not whether a mathematical countdown had expired.
But Caltrans wasn’t just trying to push the south Fresno residents’ claims to state court. It was trying to kill them entirely. On Sept. 2, 2023, Caltrans circulated a proposed stipulation that would have dismissed the groups’ claims “with prejudice” — barring them from refiling anywhere. The groups spent the next four weeks trying to get Caltrans to agree to dismissal “without prejudice.” Caltrans refused. Only after the groups obtained an emergency order from the federal judge were they able to dismiss their own claims and refile in state court on Oct. 2, 2023.
The first dismissal — and the reversal
Despite the Carmel case, Wilson has twice tried to throw out the residents’ case — the second time after an appeals court overruled him and asked him to try again.
In his first ruling, in October 2024, Wilson acknowledged that filing in federal court was not the problem. He called Caltrans’ argument otherwise “nonsensical,” noting that “a plaintiff stands to gain nothing from purposefully filing a state claim in an improper forum.”
Instead, he faulted the groups for refiling too slowly — ruling that Caltrans’ “unwavering stance” on sovereign immunity by Aug. 25, 2023, had set the clock running and the Oct. 2 state court filing came too late.
The Yale environmental law clinic, representing the community advocacy groups, appealed to the Fifth District Court of Appeal — a long-shot move that rarely succeeds.
It worked. The appellate court found two problems with Wilson’s ruling. Caltrans claimed it had informed the community groups it would not waive immunity in August 2023, yet another “undisputed fact” that, the court wrote, showed the parties were still negotiating into September over a stipulation the groups believed would let them refile. The court also said Wilson’s method for calculating the deadline was “not applicable or appropriate.”
“We believe there is a genuine dispute on the question of reasonableness,” the court wrote in its March 2025 order, directing Wilson to vacate his ruling and try again.
A change in reasoning
In his April 6 decision, Wilson abandoned the reasoning the appellate court had challenged — and replaced it with an argument he had previously called “nonsensical.” The initial filing in federal court, he now ruled, was itself objectively unreasonable. The community groups, Wilson wrote, should have known that Caltrans could invoke its sovereign immunity.
The post-deadline negotiations the appeals court had pointed out as contradictory were now “ultimately immaterial,” Wilson wrote.
Wilson did not address the fact that Caltrans had defended CEQA claims in federal court in other highway cases — including the Carmel case. He also did not point out that Caltrans had signaled openness to doing so in the Fresno case for months, too.
Wilson also reintroduced the same disputed method for calculating the deadline that the appellate court had called “not applicable or appropriate.” He cited precedent from construction defect cases — where homeowners had waited for builders to fix faulty work — that described tolling as a clock that stops and restarts. Because the groups filed on the last of 30 days, he ruled, there was no time left to pause.
“Petitioners are the architects of their own misfortune,” he concluded.
Doug Carstens, an environmental attorney whose firm won a published appellate ruling against Caltrans on a similar statute of limitations dispute over a San Diego highway interchange, said the pattern is familiar.
“It was inequitable of Caltrans to say you got to bring it in state court and then say, haha, you’re too late,” Carstens said.
He said he expects the ruling to be appealed and reversed. “The appeals court is going to get this and say, why is this here again? What did we tell you the first time?”
John Buse, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity who has litigated CEQA cases for more than two decades, said there are grounds for appeal.
“If there’s more reasonable precedent, there’s good reason to file an appeal,” Buse said.
“It can’t be right that plaintiffs have no recourse here.”
What the court never ruled on
At the January hearing, Wilson himself had pressed Caltrans on the merits — specifically why the agency didn’t study the pollution impacts on children at the nearby detention facility.
“How did you miss the JJC?” he asked. “It’s one of the largest structures in that area.”
His April ruling did not address any of that.
“It’s really disappointing, because the hearing was about the merits of the case,” Celedon said. “The judge didn’t look at or even consider that question, and looked only at the technicality of when we filed.”
The court directed the clerk to reclassify and reassign the case. Celedon said the groups are discussing next steps, including an appeal of Wilson’s ruling, with community members in the coming weeks.
“Whatever community decides,” Celedon said, “is what we’re going to do.”
