The voters spoke. A judge agreed. And yet here we are — again.

A group of Sunset residents and their CEQA-specialist attorney, Susan Brandt-Hawley, have filed an appeal seeking to overturn a January ruling from Superior Court Judge Jeffrey S. Ross, who tossed out all four legal arguments challenging Proposition K, the ballot measure that closed a two-mile stretch of the Great Highway to cars and created Sunset Dunes park.

The original lawsuit leaned heavily on the California Environmental Quality Act — a 1970s law originally designed to protect the environment that has since become the Swiss Army knife of NIMBYism. Judge Ross ruled that CEQA didn't apply because the measure was placed on the ballot by a minority of city supervisors, not "a public agency." The appeal apparently tries a new angle on the same CEQA argument, because when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like an environmental review.

Look, we're not unsympathetic to residents who lost a convenient route. Change is annoying. But at some point, the democratic process has to mean something. Prop K passed. The courts upheld it. Continuing to litigate a settled question isn't civic engagement — it's expensive stubbornness.

And the park? By all accounts, it's working. As one Outer Sunset resident put it: "As someone who actually drove this fairly regularly and was sort of bummed to not be able to use it anymore — lovely drive — I love the new park and think the efforts to close it are insane."

Another local was more blunt about the opposition: "The people here who want the park turned into a road are not interested in any form of debate. They are very vocal about it, but won't debate about it."

That tracks. This isn't a grassroots movement fighting an unjust government overreach. This is a small group with deep pockets using the court system to override what voters decided at the ballot box. If you're a liberty-minded person, that should bother you regardless of how you feel about bike lanes.

San Francisco has real problems — a budget deficit, a fentanyl crisis, businesses fleeing downtown. The city's limited legal resources shouldn't be perpetually tied up defending a ballot measure that already survived judicial scrutiny. And the plaintiffs' money could fund a lot of actual community improvements in the Sunset.

Sometimes you lose an election. The grown-up move is to accept it.