Environment Principal objections in the county approval process concerned the effects on wildlife, lack of sufficient water, glare from lights, air pollution, and damage to the existing community.
Wildlife Tejon Ranch, which is the largest contiguous parcel of privately owned land in the state, is home to about 80 rare or endangered species, including the
bald eagle, the
California spotted owl, and the
California condor, according to the
Center for Biological Diversity of Tucson, Arizona. Only 150 condors were surviving in the wild in July 2008, and Tejon Ranch is one of the giant bird's prime habitats. 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. He said, "There is no other place like this in California. It offers an unparalleled and irreplaceable connection between the
Sierra Nevada and the
Coast Ranges and the
high desert."
Starlight Responding to an objection that the development would ruin the dark skies of "a prime tourism area for amateur astronomers," county planner Lorelei Oviatt proposed and read into the record that the forthcoming
Dark Sky Society model ordinance to control such pollution be adopted for the project. Support for the project came from representatives of the Mountain Communities Chamber of Commerce, the Mountain Shakespeare Festival, the Kern County Board of Trade, and the Greater Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce. 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. He said in a video later posted on
Youtube.com that the land was "stolen." His claim was countered a few days later by Julie Turner, secretary of the Kern Valley Indian Community, who said in a letter to Kern County Planners that Robinson "isn't the tribal chairman." And Laer Pierce, a spokesman for the Tejon project, said that a Tejon-Sebastian
native reservation existed only between 1853 and 1864, when the reservation was "dissolved by Congress." On January 24, 2011, Federal court Judge
Oliver Wanger ruled against Robinson, an instructional technician at
California State University, Bakersfield. Native American spokesmen said the project troubled them. Chumash ceremonial leader Mat Waiya said that Tejon Ranch had disturbed Indian cultural sites in the early 2000s but that the ranch had followed protocols since then. 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. It says the tribe could not challenge the validity of land patents after more than a century of time had passed. In its decision, the court reached back through the history of the multiple failures of Congress and Presidents to ratify agreements with Indian tribes in the 1850s. The Kawaiisu Tribe alleges that the Tejon/Sebastian Reservation was created pursuant to the Act of 1853, pointing to a letter from President Franklin Pierce to the Secretary of the Interior, Robert McClelland, and a subsequent letter from the Secretary to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California, Edward Beale, from that same year. 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." "We believe this project has been thoroughly reviewed," Oviatt later told the
Bakersfield Californian. ==See also==