In recent California land use news:

  • President Obama designated a new San Gabriel Mountains National Monument in a 350,000-acre area of the Angeles National Forest. The LA Times has details at http://lat.ms/1waSn83. The White House announcement, including a map, is at http://1.usa.gov/1qxxFLc.
  • The Sacramento Bee reported Judge Timothy Frawley issued a tentative ruling that would approve most aspects of the Sacramento Kings arena project environmental impact report, but would disapprove aspects of the traffic impact analysis. Traffic impacts were the major subject in a further hearing on the matter Friday, October 10. Frawley has yet to issue his final decision, which will affect two challenges to the arena: the long-running Saltonstall case and the more recent Sacramento Coalition for Shared Prosperity case. The Bee has posted a copy of the tentative ruling. Meanwhile oral argument has been set for November 4 on the Saltonstall parties' appeal of Frawley's refusal to stop the project outright.
  • The League of California Cities noted the announcement of a NOFA for $40 million of Infill Infrastructure Grants from the state Department of Housing and Community Development. The NOFA and other details are at http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/iig/ but the League's announcement has information about the application workshops, set for October 20 in Oakland, October 22 in LA and October 30 in San Diego.
  • CalEPA posted an updated version of its August descriptive report on the CalEnviroScreen 2.0 mapping and screening tool. However, it has yet to make the difficult choice of which California census tracts qualify as "disadvantaged." The decision has become inflected by regional politics because the screening tool tends to rate northern and coastal areas as less disadvantaged. The choice of census tracts will have an important influence on grant distribution in the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program.
  • The U-T reported the San Diego City Council gave initial approval to a compromise "linkage fee" ordinance that would raise developer fees to support affordable housing. The measure was expected to return to the Council for final approval October 21. For some types of construction the measure would return the fees to their 1990 dollar amounts. (They were halved in 1996). The paper reported the new fees would be $2.12 per square foot for "new office buildings" and $1.28 per square foot for "hotel and retail space". However, the existing fee would be dropped from construction of new space for manufacturing, warehouse or nonprofit hospital use.
  • The Arts District in downtown Los Angeles was fighting proposals for a Metro maintenance facility to serve the planned Westside Subway Extension. By KCET's account of the dispute, the Metro planners and local Arts District boosters had made detailed plans over the course of some years for uses that turn out to conflict. The Los Angeles River Artists & Business Association has posted a petition against the maintenance yard, which it says is far too close to the city's new Sixth Street Bridge and Arts Plaza project – but KCET reports the Metro yard project completed environmental review in 2012.
  • The "Coast Dairies" property near Davenport on the Central Coast, an inland open space of almost 6,000 acres, was transferred to the Bureau of Land Management as a gift from the Trust for Public Land. The Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz organization reported, "This is a very big deal!"
  • The SPUR planning organization announced plans to open a new Oakland office, to join its founding San Francisco office and its more recent San Jose branch.
  • Capital Public Radio reported that opponents haven't given up fighting the SB 270 plastic bag ban now that Governor Brown has signed it. They've received clearance from the state attorney general to collect signatures on a statewide repeal referendum. For some history on the bill see http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3568.
  • The Sacramento Bee reports California will swear in Sen. Kevin deLeón, D-Los Angeles, as Senate President Pro Tem this evening.
  • The LA Times endorsed against the Proposition P measure for a county parks parcel tax, calling it regressive and saying it was placed on the county ballot without enough discussion.
  • Rail carriers filed suit in federal court seeking to block California's SB 861 from taking effect to impose new safety measures for oil trains. And the Center for Biological Diversity alleged that fracking wastewater had been illegally injected into the ground where it could harm Central Valley aquifers.
  • Households with dry wells in East Porterville are now receiving water aid from an international relief charity, according to the local ABC-30 TV station. It reports, "Besides donations and government assistance, there aren't any long-term solutions set up in place for this crisis."
  • Urban history scholar Mark Vallianatos has an op-ed at http://lat.ms/1ttOej2 making a case for the Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign, whose steering committee he serves on. The same writer runs an erudite smartmouthed Twitter feed at @markvalli, sometimes with extended daylong series about Los Angeles mid-century urban design and transportation planning.
  • A video dramatizing gentrification tensions went viral in San Francisco this past week. First posted by Uptown Almanac, it depicts an argument in which young men playing pickup soccer on a public playground in the city's Mission District are approached by players from Dropbox who say they have paid a fee to reserve the field.
  • San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed legislation October 8 legalizing AirBnB rentals. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted the legislation's sponsor, Board of Supervisors President and Assembly candidate David Chiu, as saying, "We can protect our city's housing units from being converted to hotels, while also allowing short-term rentals on a limited basis to help residents afford to stay in their homes." But the paper quoted Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants' Union as saying the protections against displacement weren't strict enough. In a critical writeup with detailed analysis of the Supervisors' voting choices, the SF Bay Guardian's Steven T. Jones wrote that the measure, as passed, "effectively limits the rental of entire homes to 90 days per year" but that it didn't similarly limit "hosted rentals, such as spare bedrooms."
  • As of October 13, the landlord-tenant landscape in San Francisco had rather suddenly changed. Ted Gullicksen, aged 61, was unexpectedly found dead at his home. The same day, the Bay Guardian was folded by its owner, San Francisco Media Company. The company took down the Bay Guardian's entire online archive; the link to Jones' article in the previous item of this column is to a cache that may soon disappear. On the other hand, Jones' 2012 news feature on the subject, "The problem with the sharing economy," is permanently available from the Internet Archive.
  • Maven's Notebook has the transcript of a detailed radio interview with attorney Michael Jackson of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance on California water history and his arguments against the Delta Tunnel project and the water bond measure.