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Look up the El Camino Real BRT project online, and the first impression is one of cheerful support. But that's from transportation advocates such as the TransForm organization, which has given it extensive promotion, and materials posted by the lead sponsoring agency, the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA), which would build the route from Palo Alto to South San Jose along an old arterial south of I-280.

The Strategic Growth Council (SGC) released a semiformal response on Friday to critiques received in October on its proposed design of the new Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program.

Although the question of Executive Order S-3-05 was the main event in the Cleveland National Forest v. SANDAG appellate ruling, Presiding Justice Judith McConnell's split-decision majority ruling covered a number of other important areas interpreting how the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) should be used in the context of a regional transportation plan.

The Santa Ynez Valley in Southern California brands itself as bucolic wine country, a mix between grape-covered hills and Old West charm. The Chamber of Commerce touts the hospitality and diversity of the valley's several thousand residents. But one thing that isn't mentioned in the Chamber's materials is the Chumash Casino Resort, a business run by the government of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians that generated a reported $366 million in revenue in 2008.

Aided by the casino's success, the Tribe has been able to buy additional land near its 146-acre reservation. What it plans to do with that land has been a subject of angry debate.

New laws that bring back redevelopment in a limited way. The Office of Planning & Research's effort to do away with the traffic "level of service" standard. And whether you can live in California without a car.

These are just a few of the most-read stories from California Planning & Development Report in 2014. And now you can check them out again. Here's CP&DR's Top 20 List � in order:

The Second District Court of Appeal has affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of Ventura residents who sued Ventura County over a hospital project, contesting an addendum to the environmental impact report issued 11 years after the original EIR. The court held the Ventura Foothill Neighbors' petition was not time-barred under state law and that a supplemental EIR should have been prepared instead of an addendum to the EIR. The project in question has been completed in the meantime.

California's mandates pressing large urban regions to reduce vehicle travel are tough. They possibly just got tougher with a recent San Diego appellate court ruling.

For now, the environmentalists have won their lawsuit challenging the San Diego Association of Governments' sustainable communities plan (which is part of SANDAG's regional transportation plan). SANDAG has appealed the ruling to the California Supreme Court.

Two San Diego agencies that lost recent appellate cases on climate planning have decided to seek review by the state Supreme Court.

With California in one of its worst droughts in recorded history, cuts have fallen swiftly on users of surface water, but the effects on groundwater will percolate more slowly.

Unlike surface water sources, including deltas, rivers, lakes, and basins, groundwater has remained largely unregulated in the state, even though it accounts for about a third of California's total water supply. That will begin to change soon under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, signed into law this past September by Gov. Jerry Brown.

This recruitment will close at midnight on Sunday, January 4, 2015.

The State Supreme Court heard oral arguments December 2 in the major Berkeley Hillside CEQA exemptions case, focusing on the legal significance of the term "unusual circumstances".

While the genesis of the case is a single residence, the ruling may have statewide impact on the application of exceptions to categorical exemptions from CEQA. Thus, the case has attracted interest from environmental advocates, public agencies, preservation activists, and the development community across the state.

Some important institutions got an awkward surprise last August when U.S. District Judge James Otero ruled that the Veterans Administration's sumptuous 387-acre West Los Angeles Campus was reserved for the provision of health care to U.S. military veterans, to the exclusion of several third-party lease agreements. His order sided with a group of chronically homeless veterans living with mental disabilities and/or brain injuries who argued that veterans like themselves had a priority right to receive care on the campus, including through supportive housing.