As national debates about climate change have raged and federal action has grown ever more unlikely in the shadow of -- take your pick -- economic woes, mid-term election jitters, and the blackening of the Gulf of Mexico, the State of California last week edged closer to implementing its own land use based program to curtail climate change. Per a June 30 deadline stipulated in Senate Bill 375, the staff of the California Air Resources Board (ARB) released its draft regional targets for carbon emissions reductions. 

The targets are based on what participants have said is an extraordinarily sophisticated scenario planning and modeling. 

Before we pay our last respects to the latest statewide water bond, could we at least let the voters put the nail in its coffin?

Gov. Schwarzenegger recently announced he would work with the Legislature to pull Proposition 18 – the $11.1 billion water bond – from the November ballot and instead place the measure on a 2012 ballot. State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said he would cooperate.

A unanimous California Supreme Court has upheld a trial court's decision to reject a challenge to a Proposition 218 election for a storm drainage fee, thus reversing a decision by First District Court of Appeal. 

The state high court ruled the Marin County Flood Control and Water Conservation District maintained the requisite level of voting secrecy in accordance with the 1996 "Right to Vote on Taxes Initiative," which requires voter approval for certain local fees.

Now that the California Air Resources Board has released its draft targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction under SB 375, it's time to do some math. What follows is nerdy and a little dense, but it's important – and planners need to be able to follow the bouncing ball on 375. 

The bottom line is that the math doesn't yet add up – and that's because what AB 32 calls for and what California's regional planning agencies think is realistic don't line up with each other.

A bill that would permit a lawsuit challenging a housing element to be filed at almost any time advanced through a state Senate committee earlier this week and is headed to the Senate floor.

Assembly Bill 602 passed the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee on a party-line vote of 6-3 vote, with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed.

To this day, the State of Kentucky forbids the sale of alcohol on election days. This momentary dry spell – which hearkens back to frontier times – is meant to encourage sober voting and discourage bribery via alcohol, turns a legal substance into something illegal for the public good.

On Election Day in California this November, quite the opposite might happen.

The California Air Resources Board has released very cursory greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets for the state's 18 metropolitan planning organizations.

Although draft greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions targets under SB 375 are due June 30, detailed targets will not be proposed until August. The targets, scheduled for final adoption in September, are intended to guide sustainable communities strategies that the MPOs must adopt during coming years. 

Pitting affordable housing advocates against local government officials, planners, and builders, a housing element bill has seemingly risen from the dead to become one of the hottest land use bills in Sacramento.

Assembly Bill 602 would provide an unlimited time period during which someone could sue over a jurisdiction's housing element, which is intended to demonstrate how a city or county will provide its fair share of housing at various cost levels. According to the affordable housing advocates supporting the legislation, a 2008 Court of Appeal decision placed a 90-day statute of limitations on legal challenges to housing elements. The bill would permit lawsuits at any point during the housing element planning period.

Redevelopment agencies in California are often asked to carry a heavy load: fighting blight, promoting economic development, transforming brownfields, and creating communities. Now add to that list the modest task of combating global climate change � at the very moment when they have fewer funds than they have had in decades.

Senate Bill 375 seeks to reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions through the coordination of land use and transportation planning. But the state's most recent $2 billion raid on redevelopment funds is merely the latest shift of funds away from redevelopment agencies, many of which were already coping with lean budgets.

A couple of weeks ago, Shelley Poticha, the Obama Administration's point person on smart growth, gave a high-profile talk to a big Urban Land Institute crowd in Los Angeles. Her message, plain and simple, was that it's time for what she called "alignment."