Raising Cane’s settles suit, withdraws from planned Brea location near school
A popular fast-food chicken chain won’t be roosting in Brea, after all, following a legal challenge from concerned residents.
Brea City Council reversed course this week on what was to be the first Raising Cane’s restaurant in town. Council members voted to rescind prior resolutions passed a year ago that paved the way for the construction of a 22-car capacity drive-thru restaurant at Gaslight Square, a shopping plaza along Imperial Highway but also 20 feet across the street from Laurel Elementary School.
Before the vote, the chain stated in a Feb. 7 letter to Brea City Manager Bill Gallardo that it “has determined not to proceed with the development of a Raising Cane’s restaurant on a portion of the shopping center known as Gaslight Square.”
The move and the vote came as part of a settlement agreement between Raising Cane’s, the city and a community group known as Safer Avenues for Everyone (SAFE), which challenged the planned location in court. The prospects of increased traffic and long lines so close to an elementary school and pedestrian traffic first spurred residents into action.
“I’m relieved and thankful that Raising Cane’s has withdrawn,” said Diane Stites, a longtime Laurel Elementary volunteer and plaintiff in the suit. “We’ve said since the beginning that we’re not against development or Raising Cane’s.”
The chain admits no wrongdoing in the settlement on disputed claims, but has agreed to cover SAFE’s legal fees. The resolution came more than a year after Brea residents started raising concerns about the proposed Raising Cane’s.
Kari Windes, a Laurel Elementary librarian, first learned of the plan to raze two buildings at Gaslight Square in favor of a Raising Cane’s in November 2020 on a neighborhood app and followed up with city staff.
One day, she worked on-site at Laurel as the campus was otherwise closed due to the pandemic and noticed someone doing a traffic count when Imperial Highway was largely bereft of commuters.
“That immediately felt wrong,” Windes said. “I wanted to make sure that the kids were being considered because they have no voice.”
She filed an appeal just days after Brea’s Planning Commission recommended approval of the project on Dec. 8, 2020.
In the lead-up to a City Council vote on the matter, Windes, other school staffers, parents and volunteers formed an organization in opposition to the Raising Cane’s plan. The group started an online petition that collected hundreds of signatures and also staged a protest along Imperial Highway, Brea’s main thoroughfare, in front of the school.
“We were novices,” Stites said. “We’re just ordinary regular people.”
The effort brought Stites together again with Mary Martinez, a Brea resident and Laurel Elementary staffer. Both women previously fought for a decade to revitalize the Lagos de Moreno Park adjacent to the school before imploring City Council to choose children over chicken when considering the proposed Raising Cane’s project.
“Common sense said there’s no way anybody would approve this,” said Martinez, a mother of eight Laurel Elementary graduates. “My primary motivation was the safety of the students. It’s also not good for the neighborhood and it’s also not good for the two businesses at Gaslight Square.”
The community group thought it had more than just common sense on its side, even if it hadn’t secured legal representation yet.
Gaslight Square was developed in 1988 with a conditional use permit forbidding “fast-food and sit-down restaurants,” among other specific retail uses and was zoned with a precise development overlay.
Raising Cane’s sought an amendment to the permit before the Planning Commission.
An attorney representing the fast-food chain asked council members to disregard Windes’ appeal and its arguments a day before the vote. “We respectfully disagree with the legal conclusions,” read the Feb. 15, 2021, letter to council, “and urge the City Council to deny the appeal and approve the project.”
By a narrow 3-2 vote, the council approved the project.
Windes, Martinez, Stites and her husband, Max, responded by filing a lawsuit on March 24 against Raising Cane’s, the city and property owner Dwight Manley’s management company.
“At the end of the day, having a drive-thru on part of our property does not make it more dangerous at all for anyone,” Manley said. “If a customer is driving to a mattress shop, a medical doctor or a coffee shop, the car is still coming in and out. The volume of traffic could easily be higher for a 24-hour business with no drive-thru than with a drive-thru business open 14 hours.”
The suit begged to differ. Described as a “straightforward case,” it alleged that approval of the Raising Cane’s site violated the city’s own code, planning and zoning law as well as having been improperly exempted from the California Environmental Quality Act.
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“The land-use limitations at the project site make good sense,” the complaint read. “A high-traffic use like a standalone restaurant is dangerous across the street from a pedestrian-heavy elementary school.”
It also questioned the city’s traffic study, which the suit said considered pedestrian traffic but was conducted when Laurel Elementary was closed for remote learning during the pandemic.
Raising Cane’s acknowledged concerns about its often-popular drive-thru but tried to allay them by arguing the restaurant opened after the school’s morning drop-off hours and that parents pick up students after peak lunch rush traffic.
“They neglected the 11:30 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. drop-off and pick-up time,” Martinez argued. “We service preschool through sixth grade. Nobody accounted for those little kids. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.”
The suit asked to have the court compel Brea to rescind its approval of the project; Raising Cane’s ended up withdrawing from Gaslight Square in a pretrial settlement.
Manley, who attended Laurel Elementary himself, isn’t a party to the settlement and didn’t delve into specifics with regards to future plans for the site.
“There was ambiguity in the city zoning, and we thought it was better to rectify that and tie that to the improvements for the complete Imperial Highway frontage as one plan,” he said.
The amended permit is no longer available to any new developments. For now, residents who opposed Raising Cane’s are keeping a watchful eye on City Hall.
“The city is due to have their General Plan updated,” Windes said. “They can rezone certain areas so I’m hoping that they remember that there are certain protections in place and honor them. Now it’s time for City Council to be the voice to protect their citizens.”
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