Now approved by Kern County, but a matter of debate for years in the Mountain Communities of the Tejon Pass, the development would include homes, commercial buildings, hotels, and golf courses.
[8] A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and local residents, including the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit in Kern County Superior Court on November 12, 2009, to halt the development.
The suit claimed the construction would threaten the California condor and negatively affect sacred Chumash sites, degrade air quality, and add traffic to nearby Interstate 5.
[12] Federal Judge Cormac J. Carney in December 2020 rejected a suit by opponents alleging that the development proposal should have recognized the California condor as a "traditional cultural property" deserving special protection.
[16] The Sierra Club made conserving as much of the Tejon Ranch as possible its top priority for California, Bill Corcoran, a senior regional representative, told the New York Times in 2008.
In return, the coalition agreed it would not oppose the company's plans to build Tejon Mountain Village and another big development, Centennial, in northwestern Los Angeles County.
One of them cited the "scale" of the undertaking, saying that "I can't help but feel that this isn't a plan that benefits the existing communities of Lebec and Frazier Park," and attorney Keats of the Center for Biological Diversity compared the "corporate greed" of Wall Street, "which owns this company" to the drive to develop Tejon Mountain Village for the "helicopter playboys" who would live there.
[18] David Laughing Horse Robinson, who said he was an elder of the tribe of Native Americans, claimed in an e-mail that Tejon Ranch did not own the land beneath the proposed project.
On January 24, 2011, Federal court Judge Oliver Wanger ruled against Robinson, an instructional technician at California State University, Bakersfield.
[23] Among other things, the three-judge panel rejected the tribe’s complaints of alleged forgery and deception in obtaining patents for the four Mexican land grants comprising Tejon Ranch.
[23]Adam Keats, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said he believed the county had violated the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, with a "rushed public hearing process.
[24] Lorelei Oviatt, division chief of Kern County's Planning Department, spoke at a subsequent community meeting to explain "how to navigate the data to make effective comments.