Vol. 17 No. 05 May 2002

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service cannot ignore the one-year deadline to decide on a petition for protecting a species under the Endangered Species Act, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

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Marva Smith Battle-Bey is president and CEO of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit entity that specializes in retail development and job training programs in South-Central Los Angeles. Battle-Bey recently talked about her organization's activities, about South-Central and about the challenges facing inner-city developers.

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Where do housing unit need projections come from? If you answered, "from population projections," you are only partly correct. The little-understood and unappreciated "headship rate" translates population projections into units. Small changes in headship rates could result in significant changes in housing need projections.

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These are both the best of times and worst of times for California’s mining industry. The Interior Department has lifted some Clinton-era restrictions for hardrock mining on federal land. However, the State Mining & Geology Board is considering new regulations for implementing the Surfacing Mining and Reclamation Act (SMARA) that miners say will be burdensome.

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An appellate court has invalidated amendments to the San Bernardino County general plan that gave the county greater authority over development within cities’ spheres of influences. The Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled that the county’s failure to prepare an environmental impact report on the amendments violated the California Environmental Quality Act.

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In mid-April, The first freight train emerged from an underground trench a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles and headed along a separate right-of-way toward the enormous rail yards east of downtown Los Angeles.

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Local regulation of religious land uses has become the latest battlefield in California development. There are at least seven lawsuits pending over government regulation of church development, proposed private schools, and the use of facilities by religious ministries.
Lawsuits have been filed against the cities of Concord, Cypress, El Cajon, Los Angeles and Morgan Hill, and against Alameda County and the California Coastal Commission. Additional lawsuits appear likely in Sierra Madre and Hun

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WASHINGTON _ The U.S. Supreme Court gave state and local governments a green light to continue using temporary moratoria to limit or block development while devising long-range land use plans.

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One of the cardinal rules of ballot-box zoning in California is that ballot measures beget ballot measures. That is, once the concept of making land-use decisions gets embedded in the local political culture, there is no getting rid of it — it only burrows deeper and deeper into the political landscape.

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Not often does one developer slug it out with another developer at the ballot box and in a courtroom. But that is the case in El Segundo, where Kilroy Realty is trying to block Thomas Properties Group from developing 2.175 million square feet of office and retail space on the site for a former aerospace factory near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

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