I haven't followed every filing or anything, but when I looked into this a while back, it looked like the people experiencing the nightmare were staff at LA County having to deal with a truly incompetent amusement park hamfistedly trying to build a roller coaster with minimal understanding of how to actually accomplish that task legally. It was probably a year ago now when I found this doc, but if I remember correctly, SFMM had just been flaunting storm water regulations for years...? Like, seemingly willfully—racking up tons of unpaid fines? I may have to go find that document again. It was bad.
Especially when you're building a large terrain coaster on an enormous, really complicated hillside—and especially when you're building in California (landslides, earthquakes, etc)—working with local authorities should be one of the first steps in the process. This old Six Flags method of buying an attraction, teasing a ride, planning for its debut, and sometimes even formally announcing it prior to ACTUALLY obtaining permission to build the damn thing is wild and I can really only blame Six Flags when things consistently go sideways as a result.
Hopefully new Six Flags is working through the mountains of figurative (and maybe literal?) legal debt they were saddled with by previous management and hopefully in the future projects will be handled in a far more professional, competent way... but seeing
what has happened at other Six Flags parks recently, my hopes aren't exactly high.
I'll also pitch this: Universal has just successfully built a larger coaster on a more sensitive hillside with far more community engagement requirements than Six Flags has to deal with—and that project seems to have gone MUCH more smoothly than SFMM's Thrill Glider. I believe the differentiator here is almost certainly the competency of the builder, not significantly more headwinds for SFMM vs Universal.
