By Ethan Kassel : sfstandard – excerpt
Though lights at St. Ignatius’ J.B. Murphy Field have brought nighttime football to the school’s Sunset District campus this season, the legal battles with neighbors aren’t over yet.
The SI Neighborhood Association sent out a press release Monday afternoon, claiming victory in a yearslong battle to have the lights looked into for their environmental impacts on the neighborhood.
The California State Appellate Court sided with neighbors, who claimed that the lights were not exempt from review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Both the school and the San Francisco Planning Commission had claimed the opposite. The San Francisco Superior Court previously sided with the school and Planning Commission.
The court has ruled that the lights’ lasting impacts on the neighborhood must be analyzed under CEQA regulations, which could result in new measures to reduce the lights’ impact.
The court also said that since the 90-foot-tall lights are significantly higher than other structures in the surrounding neighborhood, they cannot be classed as small structures with no impact…(more)