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The Inland Empire warehouse wars continue. In the latest skirmish, an appellate court – overturning a lower court ruling – has said that the City of Upland’s environmental analysis for a 200,000-square-foot warehouse near Cable Airport is sufficient. The dispute was over the significance threshold that should be used for greenhouse gas emissions – as well as the environmental baseline under the California Environmental Quality Act. The ruling is especially important because it was published, meaning it can be used as precedent in other cases.

This article is provided to you for free by the paying subscribers to;California Planning & Development Report.;To learn how you too can subscribe to;CP&DR;and support our work, just click;here. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed 21 bills related to planning and development on Thursday ; the vast majority of them dealing with increasing housing production. About 15 planning and development bills remains on his desk and he has until the end of September to sign them. Taken together, the bills don’t include any extremely aggressive moves by the state to box in local governments. Indeed, in a few cases ; such as a new bill on the builders remedy ; the new legislation actually does the opposite and boxes in developers a bit. But some ; such as an ADU law ; are aggressive in their own way. There’s also definitely a trend toward transparency ; posting more information on the internet about fees especially. Here are the bills Newsom signed Thursday. ADUs SB 1211: Increases the number of allowable accessory dwelling units on a parcel from 2 to 8, depending on the situation. Builders Remedy AB 1893: Boxes in the builders remedy, among other things limiting the amount of additional density a developer can obtain. Previous CP&DR coverage is available here. CEQA AB 2117: Ensures that permits don’t expire when a project is subject to a CEQA challenge. SB 393: Puts the burden of proof on the plaintiff when seeking a bond from a CEQA defendant. A response to the $500,000 bond placed on the citizen group Save Downtown Livermore in litigation over Eden’s affordable housing project in Livermore. Previous CP&DR coverage of that case can be found here. AB 2199: Extends infill exemption from 2025 to 2032. Density Bonus Law AB 2694: Extends Density Bonus Law to residential care facilities for the elderly. A dense eldercare facility was recently an issue in a court case from Los Angeles (previous CP&DRcoverage here), though the DBL was not at issue in that case. Fees AB 2430: Prohibits imposition of monitoring fees to monitor affordable housing requirements if the project is 100% affordable. AB 2663: Requires cities and counties to post housing in-lieu fees on the internet and explain how they were spent. AB 937: Allows delay of impact fee payment on residential projects Housing Elements AB 1886 and AB 2023: Clarifies that a Housing Element is compliant with state law if a court says so and there’s a “rebuttal presumption” in court that a Housing Element is in or out of compliance of the Department of Housing and Community Development says so. The question of whether a local government can independently certify Housing Element compliance has been a huge legal issue, as evidenced by CP&DR’s coverage here.) AB 2667: Requires HCD to create standardized Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing reporting, which local governments must use in Housing Elements starting with the 7th RHNA cycle. AB 3093: Adds two new categories to Housing Element income categories to account for homelessness. (Detailed CP&DR coverage of the HCD report that recommended these changes can be found here.) Other Housing AB 1413: Expands definition of “disapproval” under the Housing Accountability Act and also expands notification requirements in those situations. AB 2243: Extends AB 2011, which permits residential development in commercially zoned areas, to high-rise districts not in commercial corridors as well as near freeways and clarifies that affordability requirements apply to base units in Density Bonus Law, not bonus units. SB 450: Tightens SB 9 so that it's harder to deny lot splits, among other provisions. (For more background on how cities are ; or are not ; implementing SB 9, check out CP&DR’s previous coverage here.) SB 7: Specifies that cities and counties can’t object to Regional Housing Needs Determination. SB 312: Further clarifies CEQA streamlining for student housing contained in SB 886, which was passed after the so-called “People’s Park” decision. (For more background on the case and SB 886, see CP&DR’s previous analysis here.) AB 2488: Allows tax-increment financing for office-to-residential conversion in Downtown San Francisco. Transit-Oriented Development AB 2553: Redefines a “major transit stop” under state law as a transit stop with 20-minute headways instead of 15-minute headways. This is important because much TOD streamlining is geared toward “major transit stops” and post-COVID transit agencies have been cutting back service. AB 2712: Specifies that TOD projects with lower parking requirements in Los Angeles. must be excluded from residential permit parking.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed all but one of the 40-odd planning and development bills the Legislature passed, including – at the last minute – the controversial bill regulating warehouses.

Cities and counties in California are aggressively – and sometimes in a coordinated way – adopting the “objective design standards” required by the Housing Accountability Act.

The new State Capitol Annex has survived yet another court challenge, this one arguing that SB 174 – the bill exempting the project from the California Environmental Quality Act – runs afoul of a 44-year-old constitutional amendment designed to protect the Capitol’s historic character.

A San Diego judge has ruled that a disposition and development agreement that includes a specific development program is a “project” subject to the California Environmental Quality Act. The case involves the potential development of Tailgate Park, a four-square-block, 1000-vehicle surface parking lot adjacent to Petco Park in Downtown San Diego that is owned by the City of San Diego. San Diego negotiated a DDA with a development partnership that includes the San Diego Padres, Tishman Speyer, and an investment firm called Ascendant Capital Partners. The developers agreed to purchase the 5.25-acre site for $35 million and in return committed to building 1,700 residential units in addition to 1.3 million square feet of office space and a 1,600-unit parking space among other things. The city concluded that because the EIR had already been certified CEQA did not apply. But San Diego Superior Court Judge Katharine Bacal, an experienced CEQA judge, concluded that the previous EIR did not contemplate zoning permitting so many housing units. “Adding these residential units would appear to cause a direct physical change in the environment, on a property that previously was identified for mixed commercial zoning that did not contemplate at least 1,710 residential units,” she wrote.

In the first important court ruling following up on the People’s Park case, an appellate court in Los Angeles has reversed its earlier ruling that housing project near the University of Southern California isn’t eligible for the Class 32 infill exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act.

It’s yo-yo time.

A “reverse-reverse-CEQA” ruling from Lake County has been upheld by an appellate court, meaning the county still has not complied with the California Environmental Quality Act in trying to approve a controversial resort in Guenoc Valley north of Napa Valley.

In a case brought by grocery workers involving a proposed Grocery Outlet in King City, an appellate court has rejected a narrow definition of the infill exemption under the California Environmental Quality Act. In particular, the court concluded that other provisions of the CEQA Guidelines defining “infill” do not apply to the so-called Class 32 exemption. Doing so, the court said, would thwart the intent of the CEQA Guidelines The case is an important followup to the landmark Berkeley Hillside case in 2015 and further boxes out project opponents seeking to limit the use of the infill exemption. It was initially unpublished but the Sixth District Court of Appeal recently published the case, meaning it can be used as a precedent in other cases. Best Development proposed a Grocery Outlet store on Broadway in King City, adjacent to Highway 101. The site is almost immediate adjacent to Safeway shopping center. It is surrounded by the freeway, industrial uses, and a cemetery, with residential development a block or two away, though it is also located close to agricultural land. Safeway workers are unionized by the United Food and Commercial Workers. In reviewing the project, King City applied a so-called Class 32 infill exemption, which is available under §15332 of the CEQA Guidelines. The infill exemption, which is being widely used by local governments in California now, can be applied to a site that is less than 5 acres and is “substantially surrounded by urban uses”.

In a bold move, two judge from an influential federal appellate court have ruled that the White House Council on Environmental Quality doesn’t have the legal authority to issue “regulations” implementing the National Environmental Policy Act. A third judge ared from the ruling.

Cities don’t have to do project-level environmental analysis on sites identified in their housing element to meet their Regional Housing Needs Assessment obligations.   That’s the conclusion reached by the Second District Court of Appeal in a contentious case from Tiburon, where a local citizens group argued that the town’s environmental impact analysis for its housing element was inadequate because it didn’t do a deep dive into the project-level impacts of one of the RHNA sites. The appellate court overturned a Superior Court judge’s decision. The relevant portion of the case was published, meaning it can be used as precedent in other cases.   In an unpublished portion of the ruling, the appellate court sent the case back to the Superior Court to determine whether the town’s decision to rezone the property falls under the new law exempting housing-element related rezonings from the California Environmental Quality Act. (This provision was contained in SB 131, one of last year’s budget trailer bills that made changes to CEQA.)  The ruling strengthens the practice of “tiering” off of program EIRs, especially for housing elements, but doesn’t reduce the need for comprehensive environmental analysis of housing at the project level – at least if they don’t qualify for an exemption.   In the most recent RHNA cycle, Tiburon was given a target of 639 units, or an increase of about 15% over its current housing stock. In preparing its housing element, Tiburon identified and rezoned 17 sites for denser housing, including one site commonly known as “Site H”. Site H is 9 acres in size and currently has two residences located on it. The RHNA rezoning increased the allowable density on Site H from 7 to 93 units.   Tiburon's Site H The Committee For Tiburon  sued, arguing that because the city identified Site H as a specific site for future housing development, project-level environmental analysis was required. (No housing project has been proposed for the site.) The Committee claimed that significant impacts were likely on aesthetics, biological resources, hydrology and water quality, land use, and transportation. Marine County Superior Court Judge Sheila S. Lichtblau ruled in favor of the city, saying that the impacts the Committee put on the table were “reasonably foreseeable” and that a detailed analysis would be “feasible”.   The appellate court disagreed, saying that “absent a specific project proposal for Site H, requiring environmental review of site-specific resources under CEQA is premature and unlikely to yield any meaningful analysis.”   Later in the opinion, Justice Carin Fujisaki, writing for an unanimous three-judge panel, said: “Without a proposed project that identifies critical factors such as the amount and configuration of the proposed housing, the planned means of access to the site, and the availability of alternatives, the Town can only speculate as to the severity of any particular environmental impacts or the effectiveness of potential mitigation measures that would minimize those impacts at the site.  Because it is entirely speculative at this point whether a housing project will even be proposed for Site H, a meaningful environmental analysis focusing on Site H is not feasible.”   The Case:  The Committee for Tiburon v. Town of Tiburon, No. A171983 (partially published, February 2, 2026)   The Lawyers: For The Committee for Tiburon: Peter Prows, Briscoe Prows Kao Ivester & Bazel Prows,  pprows@briscoefirm.com For The Town of Tiburon: Anna C. Shimko, Burke, Williams & Sorensen,  ashimko@bwslaw.com