Famed U2 guitarist The Edge has failed to turn the tide in his 14-year battle to build a controversial compound with five luxury houses overlooking the Malibu coastline.
California's top appeals court has rejected his last-ditch request to reconsider a March ruling that said his 2015 permit granted by the California Coastal Commission held no water.
The rocker's request for "en banc" review was denied Wednesday, according to the ruling obtained by The New York Daily News.
In the March decision that favored the rocker's adversary, the Sierra Club, a panel of appellate judges found that the project's proper permit authority was the County of Los Angeles, not the California Coastal Commission.
With that ruling left standing, The Edge must now start the arduous approval process over again with county officials if he still wants to build his eco-friendly colony dubbed Leaves in the Wind.
"We're very relieved that the court ordered the permits for this totally inappropriate development be set aside," Sierra Club lawyer Dean Wallraff told the Daily News on Tuesday.
"This is the end of the road for this case," Wallraff said, referring to attempts by the Edge, whose real name is David Evans, to break ground with the CCC permits.
"Now the most obvious avenue to go forward with the project is to apply to the county for the same permits, but a county supervisor has (gone on record) opposing it. They could vote it down. It's political," Wallraff said.
Indeed, Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, whose district includes the Malibu area, has said the project is "inconsistent" with the county's preservation objectives and could set a "negative precedent."
A lawyer representing the Irish rock star did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
In court filings, the Sierra Club described Evans' project as an "ultra-luxurious housing development of five huge residences and five swimming pools placed smack in the middle of hundreds of acres of open space in the Santa Monica Mountains in plain sight of numerous public viewing areas along Pacific Coast Highway."
The conservation group said the development would require a long, "highly engineered" access road that would scar the hillside as well as a 7,000-foot water line that would require "substantial trenching and drilling" that would disturb "environmentally sensitive habitat."
The parcel is located on the edge of the Malibu Creek State Park and surrounded by land that the National Park Service and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy have said they want to preserve as parkland, court filings show.
Evans, 57, first toured the property, also known as Sweetwater Mesa, with his dancer wife Morleigh Steinberg in 2005.
"We were absolutely blown away by its beauty, and the position of it, and every aspect of its potential," he recalled, according to the Los Angeles Times.
They purchased it for $9 million, purportedly with several partners, and have since employed scores of lawyers, environmental experts and lobbyists to push through the plans and get permits, the newspaper said.
Wallraff said mandatory settlement discussions with Evans' camp during the previous litigation yielded "no common ground."
