Project developer Barratt American worked closely with Santee for over three years leading up to the December approval. Barratt has been an excellent partner and good corporate citizen from the beginning, reaching out to all Santee residents and welcoming their ideas and participation in designing a project that will truly benefit everyone in Santee and will fully comply with our city's general plan.

Barratt and Santee worked together to navigate and comply with the myriad of regulations and red tape that our state and federal lawmakers have created for us through unwieldy, impractical and outdated legislation including the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, and the National Endangered Species Act, or ESA. Our professional team of staff and consultants worked diligently to ensure full compliance with these laws and prepared an exhaustive environmental impact report that addressed and provided mitigation for all potential impacts. Even the project's impact on global climate change had to be studied.

The property owner dedicated half of the land as permanent open space, as well as providing additional land for parks and recreation, and accepting requirements to purchase additional parcels off-site for environmental mitigation.

In 2005, the same Arizona-based environmental organization funded a campaign to prevent the development of Fanita. This initiative was overwhelmingly defeated by 65 percent of Santee voters, who sent a clear message that they supported our city's general plan and its vision for the future of Santee, including the development of Fanita.

So who wins if this lawsuit succeeds in stopping or slowing the development of Fanita: environmental extremists who seek to stop all development regardless of environmental impacts or the desires of local communities, and the environmental lawyers who make a living by generating frivolous lawsuits.

We taxpayers lose. Our tax dollars will have to be spent on the legal defense against this lawsuit.

Home buyers lose. Part of the cost of every new home includes the expenses of unreasonable environmental laws and the frivolous lawsuits they allow.

And for those of us who live in Santee, we will have lost even more: the influx of new business for our shops and restaurants and all the public amenities that this project would provide. Even more important, we will have lost control of our local land-use decisions and our city's future to an out-of-state special interest group.

What can we do to prevent this from happening to us time and time again? Change must come at the national and state levels. One of the most important changes must be enacting tort reform to make it more difficult to bring meritless lawsuits and to hold the people or groups who bring them accountable for the costs when they lose.

The other much-needed change is a reform or overhaul of overreaching environmental legislation that tramples on private property rights. Under the Endangered Species Act, individual Americans have been prevented from building homes, plowing fields, cutting trees, repairing fences and clearing brush for fire prevention on their own private property. Both CEQA and the ESA must be improved to better balance the rights of private property owners with the interests of environmental stewardship.

If you currently find yourself on the losing end of this battle against overzealous attorneys, special interest groups and lawmakers, now is the time to do something about it. You can vote for representatives at the state and federal levels who will work to bring tort reform and changes to CEQA and the ESA. You should not have to suffer the high price of over-inflated housing costs, higher taxes and unreasonable restrictions on what you can and cannot do with your own private property.

As for the lawsuit, I will continue to do the job that the voters of Santee hired me to do – work for common sense development that benefits all our residents.