Articles

With state and local government revenues shrinking throughout California, planners are increasingly looking to the federal government – and especially transportation funds – to pay for local planning efforts, especially if they involve infill and transit-oriented development efforts. But the two major possible sources of funding – the transportation reauthorization bill and the climate bill – are both stalled with little hope of passage anytime soon.

The climate bill has been caught, at least for the moment, in the crossfire of the immigration debate. So let's get back to that later and focus instead on the bill that ought to have no trouble passing: the transportation reauthorization bill.

In the first-ever appellate court decision regarding the California Environmental Quality Act and climate change, the First District Court of Appeal has held that the future development of a plan for greenhouse gas mitigation constituted improperly deferred mitigation. For that reason and others, the court ruled the environmental impact report for an oil refinery project was invalid.

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.

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.

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.

Updating or Revising your General Plan?  Join Us - April 30, 2010!  

Not long ago, when California's economy was booming and concerns about rising seas were mounting, California tapped into its environmentalist traditions to pass popular laws that promised to lead the nation in greenhouse gas mitigation. While there are no sure signs that the global climate has cooled, the same cannot be said for the state's support of anti-climate change legislation. 

One of the least scenic ways to visit Napa Valley is to enter from the south, through the industrial zone between the cities of American Canyon and Napa. The congested traffic and office parks near Highway 221 are a long ways from the idyllic pastoral stretches to the north.