The City of Anaheim's attempts to bar a proposed adult cabaret from an industrial area were unconstitutional and the city must approve the business's permits, the Fourth District Court of Appeals has ruled. According to the unanimous appellate court decision, three city actions failed constitutional muster: an attempt to prevent "secondary effects" of an adult business, a retroactive amendment to the zoning ordinance, and denial of the strip club to protect the city's image. Presiding Justice David Si...

The Novato Fire Protection District detached the former Hamilton Air Force Base in 1977, but last month the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the detachment was an illegal attempt to tax the federal government. The court said the fire district is obliged to serve the former base, now occupied by the Navy, the Coast Guard, other federal agencies and even some private entities. The unanimous three-judge appeals court upheld Northern California District Judge Fern Smith's ruling that the detachme...

A new survey has documented what many planning and public policy experts have long suspected: California city managers prefer retail projects in their community over any other type of land use, and they least favor multi-family housing and heavy industrial projects. The survey — part of a study of land use and sales tax issues by the Public Policy Institute of California — was released just as the California Legislature considers a bill that would require cities that lure large retailers ac...

A city has an obligation to complete an environmental impact report and may not just continually reject an EIR prepared by a developer's consultant, the Fourth District Court of Appeals has ruled. The court also ruled that foot-dragging on an EIR by the City of Redlands gives the developer of a proposed housing complex a right to seek damages under the federal Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The City of Redlands three times rejected a proposed draft EIR prepared by consultants of a ho...

It was bound to happen. The neo-traditionalist planning movement is making inroads into the most doctrinaire of planning dynasties – Caltrans. Late last year, in a little-noticed but potentially monumental policy shift, the state road bureaucracy issued Design Information Bulletin Number 80, thereby granting guarded approval of modern roundabouts as part of California's highway design toolbox. Now it's up to local governments to press ahead with a back-to-the-future concept: intersections where...

The next big thing in water quality management — measuring specific pollutants in bodies of water and setting limits for those pollutants — is likely to impact land use and planning, but the exact ramifications remain unclear. After years of delay, federal and state agencies are developing definitions to show how much pollution can be allowed in a water body before it becomes polluted. These definitions are known as total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs. Section 303(d) of the federal Clean Wat...

Opponents of a 5,000-unit subdivision and golf resort in the western foothills of Stanislaus County continued their courtroom winning streak when Stanislaus County Superior Court Judge Donald Shaver ruled a supplemental environmental impact report was inadequate. In a July decision, Shaver said the county "failed to adequately evaluate the environmental impacts and the cumulative impacts, failed to accurately describe one portion of the project and failed to recirculate the SEIR." In the fi...

DEALS: THE UNRAVELING OF DREAMWORKS AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT PUBLIC-PRIVATE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DEALS Economic development and motion picture development are not alike. Economic development is a slow, often bureaucratic, process involving the collaboration of many people, including government, real estate interests, and big employers. Motion picture development, on the other hand, is dominated by a handful of powerful personalities, predominately studio heads, who can simply axe a project if they have...

A proposed lot line adjustment constitutes a development under the Coastal Act of 1976, even though the proposal would not result in more parcels, the Second District Court of Appeals has ruled. The decision means the Coastal Commission has jurisdiction over the proposed lot line adjustment. The unanimous three-judge appellate panel upheld the decision of Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David Yaffe, who compared a lot line adjustment to a lot split. "In either case, the reconfigurat...

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has embarked on a major reorganization and a series of cost-cutting measures, partly in response to cost overruns for the construction of Eastside Reservoir in Riverside County. In July, MWD's new general manager, Ronald Gastelum, unveiled the first phase of a series of organizational reforms, calling for $10 million in immediate cost savings and perhaps as much as $100 million in cost savings in the coming years. Like the Calfed negotiations, ...