The California Supreme Court in February heard oral arguments in a California Environmental Quality Act case for the first time since 1997. But members of the court gave few indications of how they would rule in the case, which centers on the lack of an environmental review for a city-sponsored ballot measure. Justices peppered attorneys on either side of Friends of Sierra Madre v. City of Sierra Madre, No. S085088, with questions throughout the hour-long proceedings in Sacramento. Afterward,

A public agency that loses an inverse condemnation case must pay all reasonable legal costs that the property owner incurred, even if there is a second round of litigation, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The decision came in a case in which the Hawaiian Gardens Redevelopment Agency delayed payment of litigation expenses and then refused to pay later costs incurred by the owners of an automobile dealership.

With electricity in California in short supply during recent months, it is easy to overlook the boom in power plant construction that has already started. Since April 1999, the California Energy Commission has approved nine plants capable of increasing the state's generating capacity by 12%. And, the commission is reviewing 14 more proposals that would add another 12% to the state's generating abilities, bringing the capacity to about 67,000 megawatts.

The owner of a commercial building and billboard next to a freeway could not avoid state prohibitions against off-site advertising simply by leasing office space to the advertisers, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled. The court held that the Outdoor Advertising Act (Bus. & Prof. Code § 5200 et. seq.) prohibited the billboard's use for promoting commercial enterprises that were clearly undertaken elsewhere.

George Lucas' movie production company and the Presidio Trust are close to signing a lease that will allow Lucas to construct a large office complex inside the national park in San Francisco. Finalization of the lease this spring would be a major advancement in a process that has involved a great deal of planning, political maneuvering and bickering over protection of historical resources at one of San Francisco's most treasured sites.

Cities on the Bay Area's Peninsula are moving ahead with restrictions on office development even though the market that spurred the enormous demand for offices appears to have turned.

The City of Hermosa Beach's "no-oil" initiative overrides the city's pre-existing contract with an oil company to permit oil drilling on a city-owned parcel of land, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The initiative is not trumped by the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution, and the oil company in question did not have a right to proceed in the face of the initiative, the court decided.

A Rancho Palos Verdes homeowner who challenged the city's "view protection ordinance" has lost his case at the Second District Court of Appeal. The court rejected arguments that the ordinance — which allows the city to order the pruning of trees that block ocean views — is an impermissible use of the city's police power and a taking. The court also dismissed arguments that the city's application of the ordinance violated due process rights.

A few lines tucked into the 1993 federal budget bill funding the Department of Interior granted the agency $150,000 to launch a "scientific review of the remaining old-growth in the national forests of the Sierra Nevada in California, and for a study of the entire Sierra Nevada ecosystem by an independent panel of scientists." That deceptively modest directive gave birth to a mammoth undertaking.

WASHINGTON _ Supreme Court justices appeared mired in a swamp of messy issues on February 26 as they heard a Rhode Island landowner's plea for compensation for being blocked from filling 18 acres of Atlantic coastal wetlands.

We were driving up the coastal area of hilly San Mateo County, just north of Silicon Valley, when we saw something ahead on the shoulder of the road. When we got a little closer, we saw it was a middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He was holding up a sign: "WILL TEACH SCHOOL FOR HOUSING." While this story is fictitious, the need for affordable housing for teachers in the Bay Area is very real. Several school boards, including those in San Francisco, San Jose and M...

For more than a century, commercial and residential development has been consuming the wetlands, tidal flats and beaches surrounding San Francisco Bay, the largest and most biologically rich estuary on the West Coast. Now, those same development forces may help reverse the trend, making possible the restoration of thousands of acres of critical wildlife habitat. Although one would assume that environmentalists welcome the change, the prospect has not been embraced wholeheartedly by the...

While the regional housing needs debate drags on in the southern part of the state, the nine-county Association of Bay Area Governments is finalizing its Regional Housing Needs Determination for the 1999-2006 planning cycle. Although, ABAG's process of allocating 230,000 housing units to its jurisdictions has not been without bumps, it does not show signs of derailing. Only 10 jurisdictions appealed ABAG housing targets, with a decision due on those requests at the end of January. The apparent...