A commission appointed by Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa has recommended local governments swap sales tax revenue for a bigger cut of property taxes. The proposal is one of several intended to reduce city and county dependence on sales tax. However, it remains unclear whether lawmakers and Gov. Davis will take meaningful steps toward altering the complex fiscal system this year. It is a two-handed situation. On the one hand, recommendations of the Speaker's Commission on State and Local G...

A proposed public bailout of the owner of Highway 91 toll lanes in Orange County has died amid allegations of financial improprieties. The experience with the 91 Express Lanes, which even privatization supporters call a "fiasco," appears to put a damper on what little interest remains in constructing private highways. "This is not something that anyone should expect to become the dominant mode of highway building," said Marlon Boarnet, a University of California, Irvine, planning professor who ...

The California Supreme Court will decide a case involving the City of Los Angeles's inspection fee on apartments. In December, five of seven justices voted to grant the petition from Los Angeles, which lost a Second District Court of Appeal ruling on a lawsuit filed by apartment owners. (See CP&DR Legal Digest, October 1999.) The Los Angeles City Council approved the $12 annual inspection fee on each of the city's approximately 750,000 apartments in July of 1998. The fee was intended to generat...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that citizens can sue alleged polluters under the Clean Water Act. The high court's January decision in a case from South Carolina was a significant victory for environmentalists, who argue that the government sometimes does not adequately enforce the Clean Water Act and other environmental protection laws. On a 7-2 vote, court ruled that Friends of the Earth (FOE) had standing to sue Laidlaw Environmental Services over the company's violation of a National Poll...

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has sided with a miner in a feud between the miner and the U.S. Forest Service. In interpreting the Mining Law of 1872 and the 1955 Multiple Use Act, the court ruled that the Forest Service could not kick a miner off his claim in the Tonto National Forest, and that the Forest Service may not have had justification for increasing a reclamation bond requirement. In an opinion that recounted the history of mining laws in the United States, Circuit Judge Andrew K...

Property owners who never filed a development application have no basis for a takings claim, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled. The court also said a landowner whose one application for a specific plan amendment that was rejected also has no takings argument. The case arose from the City of San Diego's lengthy planning process for the East Elliott community, a former Navy base that the federal government sold during the 1960s. As early as 1981, the city conceded that a 1971 East Ellio...

An appellate court has ruled that an environmental impact report for a proposed San Diego County rock quarry was closer to acceptable than a trial judge had ruled, but the EIR still lacked a proper analysis of air quality impacts. The Fourth District Court of Appeal overturned San Diego Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell's ruling that the rock quarry EIR improperly deferred study of highway widening, and that the EIR failed to account for prior illegal mining on the property. Still, the unanimou...

Delays by the City of Los Angeles in issuing a permit to demolish a burned-out hotel amounted to a temporary taking, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The unanimous three-judge appellate panel upheld a trial court's ruling that awarded the landowner $1.2 million, plus interest, for the inverse condemnation. The court upheld the trial court's monetary award after concluding that the city's delay in issuing the demolition permit was not part of the normal development review process, and...

Stanford University has proposed construction of about 3,000 housing units and 2 million square feet of academic and cultural facilities, offices and athletic structures. At the same time, Santa Clara County is exerting greater control over Stanford land use then ever before. Stanford — which owns 8,180 acres, two-thirds of which is open space — has submitted a draft Community Plan to the county. The document is more detailed than previous plans, something local government leaders and community ac...

The wealthy City of Indian Wells will give $1.5 million in housing funds to the City of Coachella, a neighboring town where residents' median income is less than one-third that of Indian Wells' citizens. The money is a portion of the mandatory 20% housing set-aside from an Indian Wells redevelopment project, which transformed desert land into an upscale golf resort. Indian Wells has spent $13.6 million in housing funds on 90 senior apartments and earmarked $14.6 million for 100 more senior units. The ...

Faced with the possibility of adding another 1.5 million people during the next 20 years, Riverside County has embarked on an ambitious effort to plan for that growth. The Riverside County Integrated Plan seeks to combine land use, transportation, and habitat planning into one unified blueprint for growth. County officials emphasize that the planning process does not seek to restrict growth. Rather, the goal of the process is to channel and accommodate new growth while meeting federal standards f...

In a currently popular coffee-table book titled The Not So Big House, Minneapolis-based architect Sarah Susanka argues for an age-old idea that seems quaint in our hyper economic boom times: quality is better than quantity. When it comes to addressing the current planning dilemma called monster houses � the phenomenon of tearing down older houses and rebuilding with Godzilla proportions in Bambi neighborhoods � Susanka may be to the 2000s what Andres Duany was to the 1990s: an architect that has desig...

Five California waterways are in the running for federal funding in a new program to help restore and protect their environmental features while building protection against floods. A federal water bill signed by President Clinton last August listed the waterways. The program is another sign of a dramatic shift in how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approaches flood control. Instead of trying to control water flows and protect every structure from harm's way, under the new Challenge 21 (also.