Yesterday, at Day Three of the APA's National Planning Conference, a panel of planning directors and other city officials from Southern California cities offered their take on a range of issues – good and bad – that cities in the region are facing. The panel was designed for a non-California audience, and the panelists' take on statewide trends was telling.  

A few highlights: 

LOS ANGELES -- For all the efforts that California has expended to embrace regional planning, it turns out that regional planning may already be outdated. 

The last time the American Planning Association held its national conference in Los Angeles, the Lakers were playing in Inglewood, the only trains to serve Union Station were Amtrak, and the only people who spent the night downtown were homeless or business travelers. Today, attendees of the 2012 APA National Conference - to be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center April 14-17 - will find everything from light rail to lofts to Staples Center. A lot has changed in Los Angeles since 1986.

You may not yet have heard, but tanks are massing on the border of Santa Clarita. 

With the American Planning Association National Conference arriving in Los Angeles tomorrow, it's likely that more planners than usual will not just be attending lectures and idly networking but rather will be actively, and sometimes desperately, trying to remain in the profession. 

Gov. Jerry Brown's successful effort to shut down the state's now defunct redevelopment agencies has taken another casualty: the California Redevelopment Association. 

In a statement released today (pdf), CRA officials and board members announced that the organization, absent its raison d'etre, would soon begin the process of shutting down, pending a vote of its membership.

LOS ANGELES - Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, began this afternoon's general assembly session by saying that the organization's 2012 - 2035 Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy "isn't perfect, but it's good." In some circles, that sort of candid modesty would probably get Ikhrata fired, or at least booed off the stage. Instead, he got applause from general assembly members, and none of roughly 20 speakers who offer public comments offered lodged any major objections. 

You know when you're driving east on Interstate 10, past downtown Los Angeles, and all you can see ahead of you is the jumbled horizon of rooftops, trees, and overpasses? That is, according to the latest Census figures, the true face of density. Don't let any skyscraper-dwelling, subway riding Chicagoan, New Yorker, or Philadelphian say anything different. 

Perhaps more quickly than anyone would have thought, the California Legislature is already considering a collection of bills designed to both smooth the process of dissolving redevelopment agencies and to introduce new tools that cities can use in redevelopment's absence.

As cities wrestle with the process of dissolving their redevelopment agencies, Assembly Bill 1585 (Perez) has been advancing through the state legislature. AB 1585 is designed to clean up many of the holes and ambiguities in AB X1 26, the budget bill that mandated the dissolution of redevelopment agencies and includes the provisions for liquidating their assets.