Salinas school districts argued that they'd never be able to build planned schools and so additional environmental analysis needed to be conducted about the impact. They lost.
A dispute from the Livermore area suggests that general plan designations and zoning ordinances have not kept pace with renewable energy advances -- leading to interpretation disputes. In Livermore, the courts have sided with public agency interpretations and against environmentalists opposed to a solar project.
When a court told the City of San Diego to engage in more CEQA review, the city abandoned the project. Then the plaintiff tried to get the city to conduct the review anyway -- but an appellate court overruled her.
Montecito homeowners said Santa Barbara County couldn't enforce its encroachment law because the county had to go through a CEQA process. An appellate court said the homeowners who blocked parking spaces on their road were the lawbreakers, not the county.
In an unpublished ruling, appellate court uses "noisy Berkeley students" precedent to rule that human noise could be a significant impact under CEQA, thus killing infill exemption for project near USC.
Because 40 rent-stabilized apartments would be eliminated by construction of a new hotel, an appellate court ruled that the city cannot ignore the goals and policies in its own housing element.
An appellate court concluded that San Diego staff emails constituted a "smoking gun" that the city had not considered a proposed increase in the height limit in the Midway area's programmatic EIR.
One camp says CEQA litigation stifles housing production and reinforces the status quo. The other camps says CEQA litigation isn't all that frequent and leads to better projects. But what if they're both right?
