The shift of $200 million per year away from redevelopment agencies to school districts as part of the state's property tax reallocation beginning in 1992 did not constitute a "reimbursable state mandate," the Third District Court of Appeal has ruled. The ruling clarifies a question that first emerged when redevelopment agencies reluctantly agreed to the shift of funds in 1992. The City of El Monte had filed a test claim on the issue with the Commission on State Mandates. However, the city l...

The City of San Francisco has been dealt setbacks in two cases in which the city attempted to argue that two hotels were not "grandfathered" as tourist hotels and therefore are subject to the city's hotel conversion ordinance because of alleged conversion from residential to tourist use. The two cases appear to have interconnected issues that may need to be resolved later. In the first case, one First District appellate panel concluded that the hotel needed to prove "actual tourist use...

The November 7 election is shaping up as a potential landmark in ballot-box planning in California. Voters are scheduled to decide an even 50 local ballot measures, the most since the November 1990 election. Although ballot measures are concentrated in the Bay Area and along the Southern California coast, the collection of cities and counties where land-use measures will appear is as diverse as California itself. Lassen County voters will consider a mountain resort and subdivision. Monterey County wil...

The massive project to prevent the Santa Ana River from flooding heavily urbanized portions of San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties continues to move forward. Orange County is purchasing property in preparation for raising the existing Prado Dam near Chino. Meanwhile federal officials are wrestling with the environmental affects of an already completed dam farther upstream, a dam that environmentalists say will harm three endangered species. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Santa ...

In retrospect, no one should have been surprised by the chaos this summer in California's electricity industry. The stage was set six years ago for a painful collision between consumer expectations and marketplace realities when the Public Utilities Commission began dismantling the tightly integrated power industry. In 1996, the Legislature expanded the PUC's efforts and practically guaranteed this summer's debacle when it hurriedly approved a complicated deregulation plan intended t...

Building on an earlier case, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has expanded protection of low-quality coastal wetlands. Overturning a trial judge, the court ruled that all wetlands in California's coastal zone — even those not located in "environmentally sensitive habitat areas," (ESHAs) — should receive the same level of legal protection whether they are pristine or degraded. Last year, the same court ruled that coastal wetlands' quality could not be taken into account in determining wh...

Tejon Ranch Company has received approval from the Kern County Board of Supervisors for the Tejon Industrial Complex, a 320-acre business park along I-5 at the northern base of the Grapevine. Although it is a 45-mile drive from the outskirts of Los Angeles, the project appears to tie Kern County closer to metropolitan Southern California, a concept that Tejon Ranch encourages. Tejon Ranch owns 270,000 contiguous acres (422 square miles) in southern Kern and northern Los Angeles counties, ma...

The Fourth District Court of Appeal has thrown out an environmental impact report for a proposed San Bernardino County landfill because the EIR did not estimate the volume of groundwater underlying the site. Because the landfill could threaten the groundwater resource, decision-makers needed to know how large the resource is before determining whether the landfill was an acceptable risk, the unanimous three-judge panel held. Although the court threw out the EIR for lacking groundwater information, t...

Ben Hulse is director of the San Joaquin County Community Development Department. Long a major agricultural center, San Joaquin County has seen subdivisions rapidly replace farms. The population has grown 63% in 20 years to about 583,000. Earlier this year, the county Board of Supervisors unanimously adopted all 13 of Hulse's recommendations regarding implementation of the eight-year-old general plan. Hulse recommended basing general plan implementation on four values: preserving farmland an...

Demand for industrial space in Los Angeles County remains high, but development is not keeping pace. Instead, large-scale industrial projects are going to the Inland Empire, where empty land is plentiful and most local governments have open arms. The trend is distressing to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation and some other business boosters, who note that Los Angeles County manufacturing employment has declined in recent years. The manufacturing segment now accounts for only about 13% of...

A major industrial project in the City of Los Angeles has received approval from the city's new Central Area Planning Commission. However, opponents of the "Cornfield" development next to Chinatown have vowed to continue fighting with a variety of legal and political tools. (See CP&DR Economic Development, January 2000) The commission voted 4-2 in late July to approve Majestic Reality's plans for a 950,000-square-foot industrial and warehouse development on 32 acres of the 47-acre Cornfield. The commi...

If you had traveled north through the Owens Valley before 1924, just past the hamlet of Olancha, you would have come upon an amazing site: a large blue lake in the middle of a high desert landscape. Wedged between the snowcapped escarpment of the Sierra Nevada on the west and the equally imposing mass of the Inyo Mountains to the east, Owens Lake was 15 miles long, 10 miles wide and 30 feet deep. Its saline waters contrasted strikingly with the rugged peaks and arid hills, and supp...

It goes without saying that in land-use planning, as in most other aspects of governance, where you stand depends on where you sit. One person's sprawl is another person's prosperity; one jurisdiction's responsible stewardship of resources is another jurisdiction's lost opportunity for economic development. When you get this kind of conflict in California land-use planning, usually you wind up in court — simply because there is no other forum for appeal. And so it is not surprising that the City of Br...

A sharply divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an environmental impact statement prepared for expansion of the Kahului Airport in Maui, Hawaii. The court majority ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration had taken the "hard look" at the project's impact on native habitat required by the National Environmental Policy Act, while a dissenting judge called the FAA's study inadequate and deceptive. The FAA and the Hawaii Department of Transportation proposed repa...