SAN FRANCISCO -- A long legal battle over a proposed Christian school near Castro Valley finally went to trial Monday, with a 10-person jury ready to decide whether the situation is a civil-rights violation or sound suburban planning.

Redwood Christian Schools claims Alameda County violated its religious, free expression and free association rights under the First Amendment as well as its rights under a 2000 federal law by denying it a conditional use permit to build a 650-student junior and senior high school complex on a 55-acre plot along East Castro Valley Boulevard in Palomares Canyon.

Redwood Christian's attorney Clinton Coddington said "schools belong ... in residential neighborhoods -- that's where children are," and much of the opposition to his clients' plan amounted to little more than NIMBY: "Not In My Back Yard."

Redwood Christian bent over backward to address county concerns about traffic, noise, visual aesthetics and other issues, he said, and were always willing to compromise even as the planning process dragged on for years.

"These are not people who disrupt neighbors. ... To have these people as neighbors is a gift," he said of his clients, noting they'd cleared the land of debris and the only noise they were likely to produce was "the laughter of children."

But a local municipal advisory board, the county's planning commission and the Board of Supervisors all concluded the project "was a far too intense use for this semi-rural land," said the county's attorney, John Keker, and were well within their discretion to decide so. "Alameda County is a very religious-school-friendly place," he said, but this project fell outside the Castro Valley Urban Area's borders and "the public good trumps a person's ability to do whatever they want with their property."

"There is not a whiff, anywhere in this record, that the fact that this happened to be a religious school mattered to anybody," Keker told jurors. "A secular school would've been treated exactly the same way."

Yet, he said, Redwood Christian seeks special treatment by invoking the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, which says government can't impose land-use regulations that impose a substantial burden upon someone's religious exercise unless that burden furthers a compelling government interest and is the least restrictive means of achieving that interest.

But Redwood Christian isn't a church, Keker said -- it's a school engaged in "primarily secular activities" and doing a fine job serving about 500 junior and senior high students on leased land in San Lorenzo since 1997.

Coddington told jurors Redwood Christian could be evicted from its leased property in San Lorenzo with only seven months of notice, leaving hundreds of families on a perpetual precipice even while the school is barred from building on land it has owned and maintained for a decade. The county has no compelling interest in preventing the project, he said, and has approved other, secular schools elsewhere under similar circumstances.

But while Coddington said Redwood Christian always has been willing to discuss smaller iterations of the project, Keker said it steadfastly refused Supervisor Nate Miley's year-long efforts to reach a compromise for a smaller facility on the Palomares Canyon tract: "Their refusal to compromise doomed this project."

Coddington's Redwood City firm is co-counsel for Redwood Christian along with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a national, nondenominational nonprofit specializing in religious land-use issues.

The trial -- which will put upward of 40 witnesses and thousands of pages of documents before a jury of six men and four women in the courtroom of Senior U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti -- is expected to last about four weeks.

 

Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@angnewspapers.com or (510) 208-6428.