UCLA Extension will offer a one day seminar, Managing EIRs & EISs on Thursday, June 3.  The class will be held at the Extension Lindbrook Center in Westwood Village (Los Angeles, CA).   

California's redevelopment agencies are pondering their next step after a court ruling that forced them to give $2.05 billion to the state in early May. The state's redevelopment association plans to appeal the ruling by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Lloyd Connelly � but most of them had to write big checks back to their county treasurer on May 10 to comply with the ruling.

The Third District Court of Appeals ruled against the California Redevelopment Association's request for a temporary stay on making a potentially devastating transfer of would-be redevelopment intended to ease the state's $20.7 billion budget deficit. California's redevelopment agencies were forced to hand over a collective $1.7 billion on May 10, with another payment of just over $300 million slated for next year.

After recently clearing its docket of California Environmental Quality Act cases, the state Supreme Court has accepted a new CEQA case for review.

 President Obama has now nominated two women to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court – and the addition of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- nominated Monday and almost sure to be confirmed -- will definitely give the court a new tilt. But the tilt isn't about gender. It's about geography. In Sotomayor and Kagan, Obama has selected two women who have lived their whole lives in big cities – they're both from New York, though from very different backgrounds (Sotomayor's from the Bronx).

The ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico may be the best thing ever to happen to the renewable energy industry.

I hope that doesn't sound crass. Really, I'm not celebrating in any way a disaster that has already killed 11 oil platform workers and is threatening the livelihoods of countless people in the fishing and tourism industries.

But history teaches us that the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 was one of the galvanizing incidents of the environmental movement. That spill also was caused by the blowout of an offshore oil well. Three million gallons of crude oil spilled into Santa Barbara channel, coating miles of coastline and thousands of birds. You can almost draw a direct line from that event to the California Environmental Quality Act to the California Coastal Act. In fact, many of our cornerstone state and federal environmental laws stem from the early- and mid-1970s, when the environmental movement was ascendant.

It's possible to reduce greenhouse gas reductions in Southern California 7-9% per capita by 2020 with a mid-range growth scenario that "achievable and ambitious," Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, said Thursday.

In a long-awaited presentation to the SCAG General Assembly in La Quinta, Ikhrata said SCAG would convey the estimate to the California Air Resources Board, which is scheduled to provide SCAG and other regions with a per-capita GHG target in June under the terms of SB 375.

Ikhrata's presentation was clearly an effort to influence the ARB's draft target. Elected officials in the SCAG region and elsewhere have expressed concern that ARB will establish a target that is beyond the reach of communities to hit. "Before ARB gives us a target we want to tell them what we can do," Ikhrata said. 

An appellate court has set aside the City of Watsonville's general plan on grounds that it is incompatible with the State Aeronautics Act, and because the city failed to consider a lower growth alternative in the general plan's environmental impact report. The ruling is the latest development in Watsonville growth wars that extend back to the 1980s.

This case is another instance in which the supposed primacy of a general plan has, on a selected basis, been subverted to other special purposes, such as coastal planning, preservation of San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe and, as in Watsonville, airport planning.

Watsonville Airport Master Plan

Don't be fooled by the peaceful, pastoral look of West Village, a proposed housing development on the campus of UC Davis.

"Shucks," the conceptual site plan seems to say, "I'm just a little old country town. See my bib overalls?"

I'm not falling for it. West Village may be bucolic and all, but this 220-acre project, intended to provide rental housing for students and for-sale housing to faculty, shows an uncompromising commitment to sustainability. Although pastoralism is not always the same thing as environmentalism, in this case it comes with some hard-minded environmentalism.

Just to clarify: the City of Milpitas lies inside the County of Santa Clara. Judging by their respective interpretations of redevelopment law, however, they might as well be on separate planets.

Though the economic prosperity and real estate boom of the past decade may seem like a distant memory, it wasn't more than two or three years ago that planning departments around the state were buried in paperwork. From sprawling subdivisions to loft renovations, developers sent them all the work they could handle. Some planning agencies even complained that attention to case processing prevented them from actually planning.

Today, planning departments are as overburdened as ever, but for completely different reasons.

The Legislative Analyst's Office released possibly the most obvious report in its history last week. The LAO said it's a bad idea to spend one-time revenues on ongoing expenses, and it's an even worse idea to generate those revenues by selling things you're going to need for many years.

The LAO concluded that the Schwarzenegger administration's plan to sell 11 state-owned office complexes to help balance the state budget was a "poor fiscal policy." The state would get a pile of money from the sale, but then it would have to spend more piles of money in future years to lease the office space from the new owners.

Yeah, no kidding. The idea is not akin to cleaning out the garage and selling a bunch of junk to pay the light bill. It's more like selling your dishes and flatware to pay for groceries. You'll have food, but you'll still need something with which to eat it.

A state appellate court has upheld the environmental impact report for expansion of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It found that project opponents had forfeited most of their claims because they had failed to raise them at the administrative level. The court also ruled that the range of project alternatives that the lab considered, within a carefully articulated range of project objectives, was adequate.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Last year shopping mall giant Westfield floated a proposal for a 49-story tower in Century City, part of a master plan to reinvent one of the great prototypical edge cities.

One Yuba County developer whose subdivision project was defeated in a referendum should buy lunch for everyone who voted against him.