The City of Carlsbad acted correctly in including traffic from a vacant store in its environmental baseline for a shopping center renovation, the Fourth District Court of Appeals has ruled in an unpublished case.

Westfield, the shopping center operator, proposed demolishing and reconstructing the vacant Robinson-May store in Plaza Camino Real, a shopping center originally built in 1969. Westfield's changes actually resulted in a reduction in the overall square footage of the shopping center. >>read more

California's Supreme Court justices were picking doubtfully Wednesday morning at the famous "CEQA in reverse" argument -- a claim that the California Environmental Quality Act can require an environmental impact report (EIR) not only when a project may threaten the environment, but also when a project would draw users to a place with hazardous environmental conditions. 

The question before the court in California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District is not so much whether projects should be built near hazards, but whether CEQA is the appropriate law to regulate such proposals. (Last year Bill Fulton suggested that if CEQA doesn't apply "in reverse", then maybe local officials will have to dust off other planning tools to protect the public more affirmatively.)

Justices Mariano-Florentino Cu�llar, Goodwin Liu and Carol Corrigan led the questioning. They appeared to view full-on "reverse" CEQA as too radical, and instead were inviting rationales for compromise outcomes. >>read more

The California Supreme Court is finally catching up on its backlog of cases interpreting the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Recently the justices moved along two cases related to the law's climate change implications. The bottom line, however, is that the list is getting longer. The court now has eight CEQA cases pending on issues ranging from how CEQA must account for climate change to whether the law is pre-empted by federal railroad regulation.

The justices heard arguments September 2 on the leading Newhall Ranch case, emphasizing greenhouse gas reduction standards. They've also just scheduled oral argument for October 7 on the "CEQA in Reverse" case, which addresses whether developers must consider the impact of environmental conditions on a project, as well as vice versa.

This is a big change from a year ago. Shorthanded from two retirements, the court had a docket full of big lurking environmental review issues with grants of review dating as far back as 2012. Last year, not counting denials of review, the justices issued one big CEQA opinion in the whole year: Tuolumne Jobs & Small Business Alliance, an August 2014 decision allowing the use of ballot measure petitions to pressure local governments into adopting large projects. (See CP&DR  coverage here.) >>read more

Just before Labor Day, Rick Caruso, the savvy real estate developer from Los Angeles, used the "Tuolomne Tactic" to end-run the California Environmental Quality Act in order to get a shopping center approved in Carlsbad.

Which means the score is now one Walmart in Tuolomne County, two football stadiums in L.A., and a shopping center in San Diego County. And that raises a pretty interesting question: How far will developers push the Tuolomne Tactic? And will the Legislature step in with a fix? 

Not likely - which means California planning regulation just got even more convoluted than it was before. >>read more

Tuesday's California Supreme Court ruling in a CEQA case involving San Diego State lays down an important marker: State agencies can't claim that a mitigation measure is infeasible just because they didn't get a legislative appropriation to pay for it. It's the second time the Supreme Court has rejected an argument by Cal State that fiscal considerations under state law should trump CEQA. >>read more

A decision to remove 200 acres of the Anheuser-Busch-owned Warm Springs Ranch from the Western Riverside County Multiple Species Habitat Plan is not exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act even though the property would be replaced in the plan by 1,000 acres on two other nearby ranches, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled. >>read more