The Manteca City Council offers a time extension on permits and fee deadlines to developers, Wal-Mart's impact on global warming is questioned in Perris, the Dyer Mountain project in Lassen County has been approved but expected to be put on hold, and the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley has released the first of their annual reports on the state of the valley.

Growth management has been a nearly untouchable topic in the state capital since the 1980s. Only a handful of lawmakers and administration officials have been willing to discuss growth management, and then only indirectly.

The State of California needs a better system for determining how much it pays for resource conservation lands, the Legislative Analyst's Office concluded in a lengthy report issued in October. Although the Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) does not say directly that the state has overpaid when it bought forests, wetlands, beaches, habitat and open space, the implication is easy to draw.

Southern California is in flames again – it's gotten to the point where I can't even remember which fire the soot on my car is coming from – and makes me wonder once again why we've given up on land use planning as a way to reduce fire risk in such a fire-prone region.

As I write this, the current conflagration has cost more than 1,000 homes and forced the evacuation of more than a half-million people. Will Californians come out of this catastrophic event thinking that we need to use land use planning to avoid fire-prone areas?

Hollywood has finally made it official: Los Angeles is undeniably an urban place – one that's beginning to look and feel more and more like Manhattan.

It's one thing when we urban planners say it and point to loft conversions in Downtown L.A. But when NBC-Universal confirms it, you know it's true.

A couple of weeks ago, NBC-Universal announced that the NBC studios and West Coast news operation is going to move – from old suburb to new urb.

California is an urban state, but it also has about a million small cities. All right, maybe not a million. Actually, there are 377 incorporated cities in California with fewer than 75,000 people.

Three bills that would have established "green" building standards for housing, commercial structures and state government buildings were vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governor also vetoed a controversial planning bill that would have limited cities' ability to satisfy regional fair-share mandates with non-residentially zoned properties.

A water supply analysis for a proposed development in the Santa Clarita Valley has passed a California Environmental Quality Act test laid out earlier this year by the state Supreme Court. The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that the EIR for the West Creek project adequately addresses the likely availability of long-term water sources and the mitigation of a toxic pollutant in local wells.

Get ready for the Great Eminent Domain War of 2008.

Jim Madaffer, the San Diego city councilmember who's the incoming president of the League of California Cities, traveled all the way to Ventura Friday – by train – to encourage local elected officials from the Central Coast to help collect signatures for the League's eminent domain initiative.

The housing market slowdown appears to be running straight into the state's new flood control laws. It makes one wonder which way Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is close to homebuilders, will turn when the collision occurs.

There were lots of highlights, and some lowlights, at my first state planning conference. Here I list the best and the worst of my experience at the California Chapter, American Planning Association conference last week in San Jose. I'll let you decide which is a highlight and which is a lowlight.

1. Flew up Monday morning (October 1) after playing musical chairs to get a seat in Southwest Airline's "open seating." I was surprised the cab driver from the airport knew San Jose was the 10th largest city in the country.

The reactions to our latest downtowns list has been interesting — and telling, because they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of "placemaking."