The city of Patterson's lawsuit against Stanislaus County and West Park has been dismissed before making it to trial, Patterson city attorney George Logan confirmed Friday morning.
I'm not sure how big of a victory this is for the county and developer Gerry Kamilos — because I don't get the feeling they ever thought they might lose, and they seemed confident all along that the suit was without merit — but it's a pretty big loss for the city in its attempts to stop this project completely. A court has now ruled that the county so far has done nothing wrong in its dealings with Kamilos. The next major hurdle for the project will be the environmental review that is currently ongoing.
Two questions are plaguing me at the moment, and I don't yet have an answer for either:
1) How much money did the city spend on this case, and was it at all worth it? Could any result have made it worth it? That might be an unfair question.
2) What, now, will become of WS-PACE.org's lawsuit against the county and developer — a lawsuit that, by my very cursory perusal, appeared quite similar to the city's?
Hopefully I'll have some answers to these questions soon. I'll post here when I do.
In the meantime, Saturday's paper needs to be put to bed. By the way, don't expect to see anything about this in Saturday's issue (we're past that deadline already). But definitely keep an eye out on the Web site and in Wednesday's paper.
12:05 p.m. Update: Becky Campo says the City Council will likely have a special closed session meeting early next week to determine their next action, if there is any. They could appeal the ruling, or they could set their focus on the upcoming environmental review, or they could do some combination of the two, I imagine. Campo doesn't consider this a huge loss, because even though the city didn't accomplish everything it hoped, it at least made its concerns heard loud and clear. Gerry Kamilos declined to comment for now, saying he wants to wait until he's read the full ruling before saying anything about it (possibly later today). Fair enough. WS-PACE.org President Ron Swift said his group's lawsuit is "sufficiently different" from the city's, but the group will meet with its attorney before deciding whether to go forward with its case. He did say they had been waiting to see what would happen with the city's case, and it appears as though the Stanislaus County court was waiting as well, as no hearings had been scheduled since the lawsuit was filed in September. More to come, but perhaps not today.
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