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The Coastal Commission's October docket in Newport Beach served up a fair slice of Southern California celebrity-involved madness and possibly more items than usual of old business of the it's-never-over variety.

The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) won two major takings law victories in late October. Clients championed by the property rights organization defeated a San Francisco law on compensation to tenants evicted under the Ellis Act, and managed to undo a coastal easement requirement that the court said was an unfair permit condition.

San Francisco city attorney to appeal

In brief California land use news this week:

A new template for land use and preservation is forming across some 1,800 square miles of Los Angeles County's high, dry northeastern backlands. Its first increment could establish some key development permissions by mid-November, especially affecting the large Centennial new-town design, other construction plans, and solar energy arrays.

In brief legal news this week:

Local political and business figures have joined Kinkisharyo International in blaming union-linked complaints, including a CEQA appeal, for deterring an expansion of the company in Palmdale. Kinkisharyo currently assembles light rail cars for LA Metro at a temporary plant. The expansion could have made it a major local manufacturing employer for the longer term.

In recent California land use news:

From many vantage points, the Monterey Peninsula looks idyllic. But it's always been a mess when it comes to water politics.

Throw in a long stalemate on solutions among the stakeholders, along with a disliked private water utility, administrative and judicial orders to cut back existing water supplies, no connections to state water – and a drought – and it's hard to see a clear path out of this morass.

About 20 years after the Monterey Agreement sewed up disputes among contractors of the State Water Project (SWP), opponents of the deal have come as close to unstitching it as they've been in many years.

In an October 2 ruling on the Kern Water Bank cases, Judge Timothy Frawley ordered the EIR on the "Monterey Plus Project" settlement to be revised and submitted for recertification, but with the revisions to focus only on the environmental impact of the "use and operation" of the Kern Water Bank.

California's state housing finance administrators published a long-delayed study October 13 on the cost of building affordable housing. It found no single factor to blame for California's high costs per unit. But it said economies of scale tend to help, and multiple layers of restrictions don't help, and that perhaps cost containment should be a more important factor in awarding housing tax credits.

The California Supreme Court agreed on October 1 to review a major CEQA case, Sierra Club v. County of Fresno, (2014) 226 Cal.App.4th 704, in which the Fifth District Court of Appeal blocked the "Friant Ranch," a large planned development focused on seniors' housing. (See prior coverage at http://www.cp-dr.com/node/3504.)

This week the Strategic Growth Council (SGC) came back to some questions on distributing cap-and-trade proceeds that were asked but not conclusively answered this summer -- and hinted that maybe these are the tough ones. The occasion was a public airing at the Council's October 6 meeting for a recently circulated draft of proposed guidelines for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program.

Attached are copies of the October 2 Kern Water Bank ruling and the statements from the Kern Water Bank Authority.

Speaker Toni Atkins of the California Assembly on October 2 appointed Gail Goldberg to one of two new public-member positions on the Strategic Growth Council (SGC). The SGC is about to set major aspects of policy for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities cap-and-trade grantmaking program. (See prior coverage at http://www.cp-dr.com/node/3578.)