CP&DR

State Supreme Coourt Accepts Election-Based CEQA Case

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, Legal Digest, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

The state Supreme Court has agreed to hear its first California Environmental Quality Act case in three years. The state's high court also agreed to review a significant brownfields case, and to let stand a controversial CEQA ruling involving water and local general plans. The court accepted for review Friends of Sierra Madre v. City of Sierra Madre, No. S085088, in which the Second District Court of Appeal invalidated an election because the city violated CEQA. (See CP&DR Legal Digest, Janua...

Frank Taylor

Apr 1, 2000

Paul Shigley, Q&A, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

Frank Taylor served as executive director of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency for 20 years before retiring in 1999. Prior to his work in San Jose, Taylor held a similar job in Cincinnati. A Boston native, he is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati's School of Architecture. With a tight control over the Redevelopment Agency, Taylor's task was to revive San Jose's downtown, from which developers, businesses, residents and even city government had been fleeing since the 1950s. At times h...

Prescriptive Rights: Recreational Trail Users Win Right to Access Dirt Road

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, Legal Digest, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

A Nevada County landowner cannot prevent the public from using a dirt road across his property, as public access to the road was established prior to a 1972 state law that greatly limited prescriptive easements, the Third District Court of Appeal has ruled. The public acquired — under the manner outlined by State Supreme Court rulings — the right to walk, run, cycle and ride horses on a dirt road adjacent to a Nevada Irrigation District (NID) irrigation canal on property owned by Jon Blasius, t...

Housing Bills Receive Broad Support: More Than 100 Land-Use Bills Alive in State Legislature

Apr 1, 2000

Featured Articles, Paul Shigley, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

Business owners, labor leaders and housing advocates have formed an alliance to promote a package of nine bills intended to ease the approval process for new homes near job sites. The bills would, variously, modify the California Environmental Quality Act, provide financial incentives to local governments, address liability hurdles to construction of condominiums, and even allow additional analysis of growth-control initiatives. The coalition has formed because of the affordable housing shortage...

Municipal Liability: City Not Liable for Landslide Despite Ignoring Regulations

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, Legal Digest, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

A city is not liable for damages sustained because it failed to record a notice that a property was in a known landslide zone, despite a city ordinance requiring such recordation, the California Supreme Court has ruled. In a case watched closely by many California cities and counties, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that the City of Los Angeles was not liable when the 1994 Northridge earthquake caused a landslide that destroyed a house in Pacific Palisades. Justices did not dispute landowne...

Tenative Parcel Map Expiration Upheld: Court Rejects Many Arguments Presented By Developer, City

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, Legal Digest, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

A vesting tentative parcel map approved in 1990 but never recorded as a final parcel map had expired by the time a developer tried to act on the map in 1996, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The court held that under both the Subdivision Map Act and the Manhattan Beach Municipal Code, the map for a four-unit beachside condominium project was no longer valid. The unanimous three-judge panel also found that project opponents properly exhausted their administrative remedies even thou...

Endangered Species: Ninth Circuit Rules School Project Doesn't Harm Owl

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, Legal Digest, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

In a recently published opinion, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed construction of a high school in Tucson, Arizona, despite contentions from environmentalists that the school would harm an endangered owl. The case involved differing opinions by experts and the trial judge's exclusion of testimony by two experts called by environmentalists. The Ninth Circuit ruled that Federal District Judge Frank Zapata did not rule unreasonably, and the three-judge appellate panel upheld the dec...

Brownfields: Insurers Might Be on the Hook for Hazardous Waste Cleanup

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, Legal Digest, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

Insurance companies might have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a notorious toxic waste dump in Riverside County, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled. In a complex ruling that combines state water law with liability insurance coverage definitions, the court ruled that the State of California "owns" all of the groundwater under the surface of the state, but not within the traditional definition of property ownership. Thus, the ownersh...

Conservation Dollars Do Indeed Go South

Apr 1, 2000

Stephen Svete, Trends, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

Among the hardest dictums for regulatory planners to swallow is this: possession is 90%. Nonetheless, it's a truism not lost upon a growing number of state conservancies, which have shown that acquisitions are among the best ways to safeguard California's natural resources and open spaces. And even though there has been grumbling about a perceived bias for funding of north state acquisitions over Southern California ones, recent history does not appear to support the complaint. The state's...

In Brief: Watsonville Compromise Permits School In Coastal Zone

Apr 1, 2000

CP&DR Staff, In Brief, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000

A new high school in Watsonville's coastal zone won the approval of the California Coastal Commission during the panel's March meeting. Also in this month's roundup of news: New Army Corps of Engineers wetlands regulations; Ahmanson Ranch battle continues; temporary logging rules adopted; Antioch says the commute is fine; federal property rights bill advances.