The partnership that owns a mobile home park in Fillmore, California received a Ninth Circuit determination September 2 that it has standing to sue the city over "interference" with its application to subdivide the park.

A developer proposing to replace two century-old houses in Fresno with 28 new two-story townhouses lost its appeal of a CEQA writ of mandate but won significant points from the Fifth District Court of Appeal in Citizens for the Restoration of L Street v. City of Fresno.

Pismo Beach: Price Canyon planning

Residents of Pismo Beach will vote in November on a measure that will give them more say in development decisions involving a large swath of land that few visitors to the city ever see. It's located inland in Price Canyon, behind the coastal Santa Lucia Mountains that flank the city.

The California legislative session ended this Labor Day weekend. Now it's all about the Governor's signing decisions. We'll have more on end-of-session legislative outcomes as the news shakes out but here are some preliminary items:

SB 270 plastic bag law goes to Governor

The AB 270 ban on single-use plastic bags had a tough time during the Legislature's final week but made it through after all.

It looks like Governor Jerry Brown's vision for Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts will become law. Meanwhile, a minor revival of redevelopment has also reached the Governor's desk but Brown appears likely to veto it.

The Air Resources Board held workshops August 25 and 26, and rescheduled a third for Oakland on September 3, on how to define "benefit" to a "disadvantaged community" for purposes of programs distributing cap-and-trade auction proceeds. The discussion will include efforts at a formal answer to one of the most important urban planning questions of the past half-century: when does money spent in a place that is defined as disadvantaged actually benefit disadvantaged people? >>read more

It can sound like a simple step, to end Level of Service (LOS) metrics in CEQA transportation analysis. The more conceptually elegant Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) metric is easy to welcome in the abstract, with its incentives for shared and active transportation, its arguably simpler calculation methods, its potential to realign CEQA analysis with state climate protection law – and most of all, its escape from the addictive spiral of induced demand for broad, free-flowing highways that, under the logic of LOS analysis, always need widening again.

But in early August the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) published a detailed discussion draft setting out an alternative transportation impacts metric in compliance with last year's SB 743 mandate. And alongside the big-picture discussions of environmentally conscious innovation, the technical arguments began.

On August 26 the LA County Supervisors gave final approval to the Santa Monica Mountains Local Coastal Program (LCP) on its return from the Coastal Commission with amendments approved there July 10.

Since the Commission had already approved the whole program with county participation, a quick pro forma approval and a round of congratulations might have been expected.

Instead, a group of indignant winemakers and winelovers made a last attempt to beat the plan before it went through.

In a rare four-day session, the Coastal Commission gave the heart of one day to hearing and approving a $6 billion project to expand the I-5 transportation corridor north of San Diego. It spent even more of another day deciding to close the Children's Pool during seal pupping season in La Jolla. And as special beach access legislation moved toward the Governor's desk, discussion returned repeatedly to the Commission's dispute over Martins Beach in San Mateo County with property owner Vinod Khosla.

It's hemi-semi-official: In the opinion of one of the state's leading geologists, no earthquake fault lies beneath the immense Millennium office development in Hollywood. That is the expert opinion of Stephen Testa, who is executive director of the State Mining and Geology Board. Unlike several other geologists who have addressed the board in this case, Testa is not a consultant for the Millenium project.

It's only $130 million. That's all the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program has to spend this coming year. Spread out statewide, it's enough money to help steer some projects toward the prescribed goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through environmentally responsible development. It's not enough to build a lot from scratch.

A few highlights from this week's news: >>read more

August 11 would have been the deadline for California's statewide ballots to go to press, but state legislators pushed that date back as they continued to work on a water bond deal with Governor Jerry Brown. According to Ben Adler of Capitol Public Radio, details emerged late in the day of a plan calling for almost $7.2 billion in spending -- most of it in new bond funds -- of which $2.5 billion would support surface water storage projects. >>read more