Judge won’t invalidate MROSD expansion

The expansion Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District was done properly,  Superior Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled Friday, according to the Mercury News.

Though no one but a handful of true believers on either side knew it, the lawsuit by Citizens for Responsible Open Space and Californians for Property Rights to overturn the expansion of the district has been dragging though the courts, as they say, for two years.

The groups also argued that a notice to the public from LAFCO was missing some key elements, specifically noting that the area to be annexed was not properly identified in the notice. The groups subsequently submitted 5,340 protest forms in hope of forcing a vote on the matter. However, the county elections office found that only 3,443 of the protests were valid, according to the lawsuit.

"The court finds that petitioners have failed to prove that at least 25 percent of the registered voters in the affected area filed valid protests," Labson Freeman wrote in her tentative ruling Aug. 22.