With all the talk these days about New Urbanism in California these days, it is sometimes easy to overlook the old urbanists. These were planners of the 1950s and 1960s who worked in the context of urban renewal and Modernist architecture, trying to fight a rear-guard action against the rapid suburbanization of the time. These planners worked mostly in very urban locations –San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia – because these were the only places where a discussion about urbanism could take place. The results today sometimes seem mixed, but there are important lessons for California as suburbs become more urban. Of all these planners, none had a more profound impact than Edmund Bacon of Philadelphia, who died in October at the age of 95. By the time I actually met Ed Bacon in person, he was already in his late 80s, cranky and quirky. He had just read my book The Reluctant Metropolis, which reminded him that I had written a magazine article many years before that he had liked. He called me up out of the blue one day to discuss whether I should write – or help write – a biography of his life. I was flattered that this legend of urban planning contacted me and agreed to meet with him on my next East Coast trip. Only later did I realize that I was not alone. Ed Bacon had flattered any number of writers over the years with exactly the same offer, and no one had ever made a writing deal with him. So I visited him at his Rittenhouse Square house in Philadelphia. He proved to be chatty, charming, strongminded – even obsessive. The centerpiece of the house was an elaborate model on the third floor of his vision for how to improve Independence Mall. Characteristically incensed that the city’s planners had proposed a plan he didn’t like, he built the model at his own expense to prove his idea was better. He had fought the city’s plan so hard that the planners of the day regarded him to be cantankerous almost to the point of being a gadfly. This was classic Bacon. Bacon was born in Philadelphia in 1910 and was trained as an architect in the Beaux Arts style at Cornell during the late 1920s – “I was there before the Modernists arrived,” he once told me. His zenith came during the 1950s and ’60s, when as executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission he engaged in the most successful urban revitalization efforts of the era. He razed eight square blocks around Independence Hall to create a more formalistic setting, reviving the neighboring historical neighborhood of Society Hill in the process. He tore down the “Chinese Wall” – a large railroad bridge next to Philadelphia City Hall – to make room for the Penn Center office complex. And he rejected architect Louis Kahn’s starkly modernist plan for the downtown. Bacon had a way of coming across as naïve, but he accomplished things no one so naïve could have done. He was part of a political reform movement that pulled Philadelphia out of the machine era; and he helped rewrite the city charter in a way that gave the Planning Commission – and, hence, him – more power than planners in almost any other city had. He once told me that he did it by writing policies that would kick in far in the future, beyond the time horizon of all the politicians. More than anything, however, he succeeded because he had an artist’s vision and a monarch’s will. His vision was the city as the experience of moving through space – a path or a shaft – and most of his plans used this idea as the focal point. His idea of an implementation technique was to use the force of a will so strong that he seemed unable to separate Philadelphia from himself. The first chapter of his classic book Design With Cities is titled “The City as an Act of Will.” In our first conversation at his house, he suggested that, having written a book about Los Angeles called The Reluctant Metropolis, I should now write a book about Philadelphia called The Acquiescent Metropolis. “Acquiescent to whom?” I asked. He looked at me in disbelief. How could I not know? “Why, to me, of course,” he replied. Tethered to such a strong personal vision and a strong personal will, Bacon did not seem to notice or care about the city’s changing demographics, or the growing significance of race and class in planning discussions, and eventually this made him seem old-fashioned and out of date. Bacon’s decline began in the mid 1960s, when he went toe-to-toe with advocacy planners such as Paul Davidoff over the proposed construction of a freeway on the edge of Society Hill. The freeway would have required the demolition of the black neighborhood adjacent to increasingly tony Society Hill. Bacon, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school, favored the freeway; Davidoff, who taught in the Penn planning school, opposed it. Davidoff won and Bacon lost, thus setting off a trend in advocacy planning and a corresponding decline in physical planning that lasted until the New Urbanists emerged a quarter-century later. (Another side effect of this battle was that my brother, who for many years ran a retail beer store on Bainbridge Street called “Society Hill Beverage,” had to stock an extremely wide range of beers to meet the diverse market demand in the surrounding neighborhoods.) Even today, 40 years later, almost all planning students read Davidoff’s classic article, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.” But not very many of them read Design of Cities. The New Urbanists revived Bacon’s reputation to a certain extent; Design of Cities is on every New Urbanist reading list because Bacon’s physical determinism and his formalistic design impulses jibe with New Urbanist thinking. Oddly, however, even the New Urbanists don’t really talk all that much about Bacon’s accomplishments. I think that’s because most of his urban design ideas, such as Penn Center, were implemented during the height of the Modernist era, and New Urbanists have a hard time admitting that good urban design can be created in a Modernist style. But Penn Center is good – not perfect, but an excellent example of experiencing a city by moving through space, constructed at a time when such accomplishments were rare. It stands as a perpetual reminder that Modernist architecture and bad urban design don’t always go hand in hand. I once asked Bacon why, given the force of his will and the breadth of his vision, he went along with Modernism in revitalizing downtown Philadelphia. And the great idealist gave me a surprisingly pragmatic answer. “I wouldn’t have chosen it,” he said, “but it was what I had available to me at the time.” I went to planning school at the height of the advocacy planning era and consequently gained almost no formal education in design. But I spent a lot of time in Philadelphia during the ’70s, before I moved to Los Angeles, and so in a way I learned my urban design inside Bacon’s mind. Many years later, when urbanism old and new came back into style, I was thankful that that I had this education to fall back on.

The City of Bakersfield has proposed a 112-square-mile expansion of its sphere of influence, the first step toward a major expansion of the southern San Joaquin Valley city of nearly 300,000 people. City officials say that the proposed sphere expansion, which would cover nearly as much land as the current city, is simply a logical step in Bakersfield’s inevitable growth within a large metropolitan planning area. Kern County officials, thus far, are not opposing the move. In fact, there appears to be little in the way of major opposition locally. Still, the shear size of the proposal — 71,576 acres — has generated outside interest. “I think it’s one of the largest sphere of influence applications a LAFCO has ever seen,” said William Chiat, executive director of the California Association of LAFCOs, or CALAFCO. Actually, although the City Council approved the sphere application on October 12, the Kern County LAFCO had not yet received the application as of late October, and Executive Officer William Turpin was reluctant to discuss Bakersfield’s proposal. Both the Department of Conservation and the state Attorney General’s office appear to be paying attention to the city’s proposal, which could ultimately urbanize tens of thousands of acres of farmland. If the sphere were approved and the city later annexed the area, Bakersfield, a city with some of the worst air pollution in the country and minimal public transit, would stretch over nearly 30 miles, from Interstate 5, across Highway 99, to the mouth of the Kern River canyon. City officials offer no apologies for their proposal. The area the city is eying lies entirely within the 408-square-mile region covered by the Metropolitan Bakersfield General Plan, a joint city-county plan for development of Kern County’s largest urban area. “This is step one of a good, long-term plan,” Bakersfield City Councilman David Couch said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me for our sphere not to be as big as the metropolitan planning area. If our sphere is not the same as that, we run into development in the county that is not at the same standards as in the city.” Bakersfield Development Services Director Stanley Grady said that — based on projected growth rates and a population density of 2,500 people per square mile — the proposed sphere area would accommodate 280,000 people, or about 20 years worth of growth. A 20-year planning horizon is not uncommon, he said. The proposed sphere area’s buildout “is well within the range of what you should be planning for,” Grady said. “You don’t want to wait until you’re 5 or 10 years out to start planning for the infrastructure you’re going to need.” In fact, the city’s proposal is not out of character with the metro general plan. In a report to the Board of Supervisors, Kern County Planning Director Ted James wrote, “After reviewing Bakersfield’s SOI proposal and conferring with Bakersfield officials, the County Administrative Office and Planning Department jointly conclude the proposed City of Bakersfield planned expansion area is consistent with the intent of the Metropolitan Bakersfield General Plan.” By almost any measure, Bakersfield is one of the state’s fastest growing cities. According to the Department of Finance, the Kern County seat added 13,222 people in 2004 — more than any other city of fewer than 300,000. The city’s population has increased by 70% since 1990. In recent years, the city has permitted 4,000 to 5,000 housing units a year, and billboards from the nation’s largest builders rise all over town. Tens of thousands of units are planned. Exactly what is driving the boom is a bit unknown. Real estate experts say as many as one-third of new houses are being purchased by speculators. With a median price of less $300,000, Bakersfield remains one of the least expensive markets in the state. There also is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the inexpensive real estate is drawing Southern California retirees who are cashing out of pricey urban areas, and commuters to Los Angeles. The tens of thousands of jobs in Santa Clarita are only an hour’s drive away — when conditions are clear — from the south end of Bakersfield. Chiat, of CALAFCO, said he would expect the environmental and agricultural communities to object to any sphere of influence proposal as large of Bakersfield’s. However, there is little political opposition to urban growth in Bakersfield. “There is not a lot of public involvement here,” said Lorraine Unger, who, with her husband, Arthur, heads the Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club. Lorraine Unger said she monitored local government public hearings for years, and “I used to be the only member of the public at the meetings.” Arthur Unger said that Bakersfield’s growing population is self-selected to be apathetic. “Who comes here from Los Angeles? The person who says they want the most house per dollar, the easy traffic and he’ll take his chances with the smog,” Arthur Unger said. Grass-roots efforts to push “smart growth” in Bakersfield appear to have waned in recent years. Rather than try to block growth, the local Sierra Club cuts deals with developers. In exchange for a developer’s paying $1,200 per house to fund air pollution mitigation, the Sierra Club agrees not to sue over a project’s environmental review, explained Gordon Nipp, a local activist. The money goes to a private foundation that will fund things such as cleaner school buses. The idea is prevent housing development from making air quality worse, explained Nipp. Although some have complained of “environmental extortion,” developers of 16 projects have agreed to pay the $1,200-per-house fee to stay out of court. Farmers also appear to be presenting little resistance to the sphere proposal. James said the owners of thousands of acres of land that have been covered by the Williamson Act — which provides tax breaks to farmland owners who agree not to develop their property — have canceled their contracts in recent years. Farmland that sold for $4,000 an acre in recent memory is now fetching $120,000 or more per acre, James pointed out. Tellingly, one of the recent Williamson Act cancellations was filed by James Borba, who owns about 2,400 acres off Interstate 5 and within the proposed sphere expansion. Borba fought very hard to open a 14,000-cow dairy on the property only a few years ago. The Bakersfield California reported in September that Borba is working on a deal with developer D.R. Horton. In many places, the county would oppose a large sphere of influence expansion into unincorporated territory — but not in Kern County, where the Board of Supervisors is keeping the county out of the urban development business. The county is starting to use the issue of sewage more aggressively to limit growth in unincorporated areas. There is little sewer service outside the Bakersfield city limits, and the county is in the process of increasing the minimum parcel size that can have a septic system from 1 acre to 3 acres. “We are not in the business of providing sewer,” James said. “We send landowners to the city.” Indeed, the city has more than 50 annexation applications at LAFCO, and the county has more than 20 general plan amendment applications, mostly northwest of the city limits. James recommends a comprehensive look — and one large environmental impact report — for all of the activity, including the various applications and the sphere of influence proposal. He also would add an update to the metropolitan general plan, even thought it was last revised only three years ago. “We’re looking at urbanizing a big area, but it’s happening piecemeal right now,” James said. “We’re missing something if we don’t update all of this at one time. “Quarter-acre lots are the king around here,” James continued. “Shouldn’t we be talking about density? How can we get more efficient land uses?” Turpin, the local LAFCO officer, noted there is 70,000 acres of undeveloped land within Bakersfield’s current 207-square-mile sphere of influence. But Grady, the city’s chief planner, has little patience for such discussions. The city’s newer areas have densities of 400 more people per square mile than the city’s former average, he noted, and the city has approved residential lot sizes as small as 4,500 square feet. The community has chosen to develop at low to moderate densities, and comparisons with more crowded coastal areas are unfair, he contended. “There’s not a lot of infill left to do in Bakersfield,” asserted Councilman Couch. “We have some redevelopment projects downtown. And we have some county islands, but they are built out.” Loss of farmland is not a factor, added Grady, who contended there is more productive farmland now than 10 years ago. “We figure if there’s a statewide problem, then the state should be addressing it,” he said. The loss of farmland would appear to be a good subject for an environmental impact report on the sphere expansion. However, the city, saying the sphere change is merely paperwork, is proposing to use a negative declaration. Further environmental review would be conducted when there is a proposal for annexation, Grady said. Whether LAFCO will accept that argument is unknown, and Turpin declined to speculate. But CALAFCO’s Chiat said, “I can’t imagine that Kern LAFCO would adopt a sphere like that without a pretty substantial environmental review.” Coincidentally or not, Gov. Schwarzenegger in October signed a bill (SB 967, Florez) that guarantees Bakersfield has a representative on LAFCO. Contacts: Stanley Grady, Bakersfield Development Services Department, (661) 326-3733. David Couch, Bakersfield City Council, (661) 326-3767. Ted James, Kern County Planning Department, (661) 862-8600. William Turpin, Kern County Local Agency Formation Commission, (661) 716-1076. Arthur and Lorraine Unger, Kern-Kaweah Chapter, Sierra Club, (661) 323-5569. William Chiat, California Association of Local Agency Formation Commissions, (916) 442-6536.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ended the 2005 legislative year by vetoing one-quarter of the approximately 900 bills that lawmakers sent him. Among the bills that the governor rejected was a zoning bill targeted by the League of California Cities. Assembly Bill 712 (Canciamilla) would have tightened the standards for findings necessary for density reductions and extended similar “no-net-loss” limitations to residentially zoned sites not identified in a housing element as required for meeting a jurisdiction’s fair-share housing mandate. The bill further would have extended a sunset on a provision allowing for attorney fees when someone sued a jurisdiction for violating the no-net-loss law. It was the attorney fee provision to which both the League and the governor objected. “Providing incentives for third parties to sue local governments over housing decisions, as provided in this bill, is inappropriate and does not build any additional housing,” Schwarzenegger said in his veto message. “The threat of lawsuits diminishes flexibility and creativity when designing a community.” The Republican governor also vetoed SB 940 (Torlakson), which addressed prevailing wage rates set by the Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) for residential projects. Under state law, many subsidized housing projects are required to pay prevailing wages to construction workers. The DIR sets the rates based on wages reported under contracts for commercial projects (see , May 2005). Affordable housing developers insist that residential projects it takes DIR as long as six months to determine rates for certain residential construction trades. Meanwhile, rates for commercial trades are immediately available. The Torlakson bill would have required DIR to replicate for residential construction trades the method it uses for setting commercial construction trade wage rates. The bill, however, was co-sponsored by organized labor — and this governor is proving no friend of unions. In his veto message, Schwarzenegger said DIR “has less than two-thirds of the information it needs for residential rate determinations” and that the bill “does nothing to remedy this deficiency.” Democratic legislators are likely to take another run at the issue next year. It appears Democrats may also get even more serious about flood control legislation in 2006. In addition to Assemblyman John Laird’s push for a new Central Valley flood control agency and a new funding source, Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter) said in October that he would introduce legislation to alter who is appointed to the state Reclamation Board. In late September, only days after the Reclamation Board decided to start commenting on the environmental review of every development proposed in a Central Valley floodplain, the governor replaced the entire board with seven new appointees who appeared to be far friendlier to development interests. “It definitely raises alarms that when this board took a stand against urban development in floodplains, the board was removed,” Florez said. Florez, chairman of the Governmental Organization Committee, said he would consider requiring that board appointees be experts in geology, hydrology or related fields. He also said he would consider giving the Reclamation Board “greater say” over local general plans. As for legislation that did pass this year, the governor approved: • SB 253 (Torlakson), which clarifies what fees may be charged to cover the cost of the regional housing needs allocation process. • SB 326 (Dunn), which permits by-right development of duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes. • SB 435 (Hollingsworth),which makes clear that mobile homes, certain senior citizen projects and limited equity cooperatives qualify for affordable housing density bonuses. The bill also lets cities recapture subsidies provided to such projects. • SB 575 (Torlakson), which strengthens anti-NIMBY law relating to affordable housing projects and prevents cities and counties from rejecting or conditionally approving a project unless the jurisdiction has met its fair-share housing needs for the planning period. • SB 950 (Torlakson), which increases the types of housing that are considered “at risk” for the purpose of awarding tax credits. • SB 1087 (Florez), which requires water providers to reserve capacity for affordable housing projects. • AB 691 (Hancock), which allows local governments to designate existing specific plans or redevelopment plans as “transit village plans.” • AB 1200 (Laird), which requires the state by 2008 to evaluate the potential impacts of a Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta levee failure and provide options for addressing the risks. • AB 1233 (Jones), which requires that any portion of a local government’s share of a regional housing need that is not met during one planning period must be carried forward to the next round of fair-share housing allocations. A city or county would be required to zone land to provide for the fair-share that gets carried forward. • AB 1390 (Jones), which expands enforcement of a redevelopment agency’s low- and moderate-income housing requirements, and amends certain replacement and rehabilitation housing requirements. The legislation establishes a 10-year statute of limitations for suing redevelopment agencies for violating housing mandates. • AB 1746, which extends the deadline for Local Agency Formation Commissions to update their spheres of influence to January 1, 2008. The governor vetoed: • SB 820 (Kuehl), which would have required greater reporting of groundwater extractions, required the Department of Water Resources to analyze State Water Project delivery prospects under a variety of conditions, and required preparation of agricultural water management plans similar to urban water plans. Schwarzenegger called the bill “a significant burden on property owners.” • AB 1747 (Wolk), which would have permitted the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians to become a member of a joint powers authority that could purchase the 17,000-acre Conaway Ranch, possibly by eminent domain. Local governments in Yolo County fear the ranch could be developed or its water rights sold, and the Rumsey Band has offered to help finance the acquisition. The governor said that allowing a tribal government to exercise public power “diminishes public accountability and control.”

One of the most interesting phenomena of the urban-infill craze of recent years has been the conversion of industrial corridors, such as riverfronts and railroad tracks, into middle-class housing, “creative” office space and touristy retail. Places that earlier generations had hidden from view because of their filth and lack of gentility are now becoming civic ornaments. Introverted industrial zones are becoming extroverted public playgrounds. Former industrial corridors are the locales of new parks, museums or other cultural uses, as well as profitable homebuilding. Developers who seek out opportunities in urban infill, however, are looking for trouble. In contrast to the comparative simplicity of greenfield development, where the suburban builder has a free hand in laying out streets and buildings, the infill developer must contend with contaminated soil, historic buildings, antiquated infrastructure and frequently intense political pressures. Infill developers must also navigate between competing goals, such as housing and open space. And with high land costs and a slow entitlement process, open space may end up the loser. The Central Station project, which flanks an abandoned Union Pacific station in the industrial section of West Oakland, is a Bay Area example of corridor gentrification. Local developer Rick Holliday, who has a background in loft conversions in San Francisco, bought the 29-acre property in December 2000 from the Union Pacific, including the handsome Beaux Arts-style rail station, which Amtrak used until the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Although Holliday had originally envisioned a mixed-use district with up to 2 million square feet of commercial space, the robust housing market coupled with the weak office market in the wake of the dot-com crash convinced the developer to re-position the project as an urban village. He plans about 1,400 units, which vary in height and density, from three stories on the southern boundary to seven stories on the north, at West Grand Avenue. In 2002, Holliday divided the property into nine different “development areas” keeping two for an affiliate of Holliday Development and selling the rest to different merchant builders. Notable among them is BUILD West Oakland, the CalPERS-funded, for-profit arm of Bridge Housing, the prolific non-profit homebuilder. Significantly, BUILD West Oakland owns both the 8,000-square-foot train station, the reuse of which remains undecided, as well as a three-quarter-acre site directly south of the building that planners have earmarked for open space. While most of the housing is to be built during the next decade, the developers have promised “moderate priced” housing in the $250,000- to $400,000-range, which is well below the median prices in the Bay Area and may create home ownership opportunities for first-time buyers. (There is no designated low- and moderate-income component, however.) The site plan indicates a variety of housing types, including conventional apartments, townhouses and courtyard housing. The planning on the Central Station site is sophisticated. Zoning guidelines for the area known as the Wood Street Zoning District call for plentiful landscaping, the undergrounding of utilities, and setbacks in the profile of tall buildings to prevent streets that look like shadowy canyons. Best of all, the guidelines provide pedestrian connections across a six-block area of the Central Station site. These connections allow people on foot and bicycles to avoid traffic throughout the entire site. Equally important, the connections make it impossible for cars to zoom through the neighborhood as a short-cut to Interstate 880, which lies directly west of the site. This simple but powerful design move ensures safety and comparative quiet for the new residential neighborhood. Starting with these guidelines, David Baker + Partners, a San Francisco architectural firm, prepared a conceptual site plan on behalf of the developer that has a number of sensible touches. The site planners appear to be struggling with the difficulty of somehow softening the impact of this great wall of housing, which starts at three stories and steady rises as the plan moves northeast from 10th Street to West Grand Avenue, where the buildings are slated to be seven stories. The site planners rightly make the old train station into the visual centerpiece at 16th Street, where passers-by can enjoy an unobstructed view of the historic building. They create wide streets at two-block intervals between 12th and 20th streets. The designers also provide something like a linear park along the western frontage road that parallels I-880. The tallest and most dense structures are located to the north, where the 90-foot-tall buildings are to loom over the elevated roadway of West Grand Avenue. What Baker has not been able to do, however, is to create adequate open space for a neighborhood that could house more than 3,000 people in a little less than 30 acres. It is true that the streets will be walkable and that the pedestrian connections between blocks go a long distance toward providing some opportunities for exercise. But open space is essential to quality of life, both to provide the background for exercise and to offset the oppressive atmosphere of tall buildings. It is unfortunate that the largest single open space in the Central Station design is the “front yard” of the train station, which is less than an acre. The site planners might retort, with reason, that the ratio of green space to buildings is actually high, and, further, that the linear park spaces allow plenty of opportunity for jogging and bicycling. What is missing, however, are ball fields and spaces suitable for large gatherings. Large open spaces also have esthetic value, providing what might be called psychological breathing room. The ultimate culprit here is the city, which appears to have sacrificed a quality-of-life issue — parks and open space — in the name of maximizing homebuilding. By failing to do so, the city has lost a once-in-a-century opportunity to provide for the public realm. One possible solution would have been for the city to buy one or two of the parcels as parkland, using park bonds to buy the land and creating an assessment district in the Central Station area to pay them off. Maybe that would have reduced housing affordability. However, the shortfall in open space mars an otherwise admirable plan.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a plan that gives the San Joaquin Valley until 2010 to achieve permissible amounts of soot and dust in the air. Environmentalists and public health advocates had argued for a 2006 deadline. Over the last 15 years, air pollution has emerged as one of the biggest issues in the San Joaquin Valley (see , January 2004, April 2002). Increasingly, the issue has land use implications, as air quality regulators restrict certain farming practices and search for ways to encourage denser development. The issue in this case is PM-10 — particulate matter of 10 microns or less. Unlike ozone pollution, PM-10 is visible to the human eye. The San Joaquin Valley has some of the highest PM-10 levels in the country, primarily from travel on dirt roads, agricultural practices and burning. In 1990, Congress added provisions to the Clean Air Act specifically to address PM-10 pollution. At that time, the Valley was classified a “moderate area” for PM-10 pollution, a classification that gave the region until December 31, 1994, to attain air quality standards. State and regional officials appealed and got the Valley reclassified as a “serious area,” which changed the attainment deadline to December 31, 2001. The San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District and the California Air Resources Board submitted an attainment plan to EPA in 1997 but withdrew the blueprint when EPA indicated it would reject the plan. The state did not submit a new plan until July 2002 — six months after the attainment deadline passed. Because of the missed deadline, EPA required the state to revise the plan to reflect 5% annual reductions in PM-10 pollutants. The state submitted the revised plan in August 2003, and EPA approved it the following year. The revised plan contains a December 31, 2010, deadline for attainment — a full 16 years later than the original deadline. The groups Association of Irritated Residents, Latino Issues Forum, Medical Advocates for Healthy Air and Sierra Club then sued the EPA, arguing that the EPA could not extend the deadline past 2006. The advocacy groups also challenged the plan’s methods of attaining air quality standards. A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, however, upheld the EPA’s actions. The groups argued that because the Clean Air Act contains provisions for a five-year extension of the PM-10 deadline, the EPA could not rely on more general Clean Air Act provisions to grant consecutive five-year extensions. They also argued that the EPA’s interpretation of the law would allow for endless 10-year extensions without repercussions. But the Ninth Circuit determined that specific PM-10 measures in the act do not prohibit “the EPA’s application of the general provisions to change attainment deadlines.” “There are repercussions for failing to attain the standard by the applicable deadline,” Chief Judge Mary Schroeder wrote for the Ninth Circuit. She cited the requirement that areas that do not request a deadline extension must reduce emissions by 5% annually, and the possibility that the federal government could withhold highway funding. As for achieving those 5% reductions, the advocacy groups argued that Valley air regulators should not be able to count reductions based on the implementation of “best available control measures,” because the Clean Air Act has required those measures in the Valley since 1997. They argued that the plan’s approach would let regulators count attainment measures that should have been implemented years ago as “reductions.” The Ninth Circuit disagreed. “ ate implementation is better than none,” Schroeder wrote. The court also rejected the argument that the Valley should not be able to credit “excess reductions” to future years. The advocacy groups further challenged the EPA’s decision not to act on the 2003 plan’s contingency measures in the event of another missed deadline. The groups argued that the agency had to decide one way or the other. The EPA contended it could approve plans piecemeal. The Ninth Circuit sided with the EPA. Piecemeal approvals “ensure that earlier-approved provisions will become federally enforceable as soon as possible,” Schroeder wrote. The Case: , No. 04-72650, 05 C.D.O.S. 8024, 2005 DJDAR 10882. Filed September 6, 2005. The Lawyers: For AIR: Brent Newell, Center on Race, Poverty & Environment, (661) 720-9140. For the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District: Philip Jay, (559) 230-6033.

The state Legislature wrapped up its business for the year without passing substantial land use legislation. A bill addressing Central Valley flooding threats failed to even get a vote in the state Senate, despite the attention focused on the flood catastrophe Louisiana. Bills seeking to alter eminent domain or redevelopment authority also failed to pass. Before adjourning on September 8, the Legislature did pass a handful of housing bills aimed at getting local governments to approve more units. But even housing advocates offered faint praise of lawmakers’ production this year. Many lobbyists, Capitol staff members and even lawmakers said 2005 was one of the Legislature’s least productive years in memory. When lawmakers returned in August from their summer recess, the normal mad rush to pass bills never occurred because both lawmakers and the Schwarzenegger administration were focused on the November special election for eight initiatives. A much-discussed housing package from the administration never materialized in bill form. Neither did an anticipated agreement between the League of California Cities and the California Building Industry Association. A promised Democratic bill to amend the California Environmental Quality Act to ease housing projects remained only a promise. Legislation related to flood control appeared as if it would gain new momentum during the Legislature’s final 10 days based on the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast. Lawmakers did approve one minor bill, AB 1200 by Assemblyman John Laird (D-Santa Cruz). The measure requires the departments of Water Resources and Fish and Game, as part of a current study of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta levees, to evaluate the potential impacts of Delta levee failure and rate options for addressing the risks. A report is due to the Legislature in 2008. Laird’s more substantial flood bill, AB 1665, passed the Assembly after significant amendments but never got out of committee in the Senate. As originally written, the bill would have created the Central Valley Flood Control Assessment District to tax lands in a floodplain or that drain to a floodplain. The massive district would have replaced the state Reclamation Board, a small agency that now oversees Central Valley flood control. The bill passed the Assembly only after Laird removed the assessment provisions. During the Legislature’s final days – with about 1 million people in Louisiana displaced because of flooding — Laird amended the legislation to require the Board to map areas at risk of flooding and to notify landowners annually if their property is within a levee protection zone. Real estate interests opposed the notification requirement. “After New Orleans, people looked a little differently on the bill,” Laird said after the session ended. However, he said, the New Orleans catastrophe occurred late in the Legislature’s year, and moving a substantial flood bill during the final week was too difficult. “All the way along, it was designed to be the administration’s bill. But the administration never really vetted all the issues with the interest groups early on,” Laird said. He declined to characterize those who were against AB 1665 as the “opposition.” “It’s not opposition. It’s different interests in the solution,” said Laird, who vowed to return with legislation in 2006. Developers believe they have the right to build, and farmers believe they should not be penalized for problems created by urban growth, and neither of those groups wants to pay more than their fair share, Laird said. Laird estimated that fixing California’s levees would cost “in the billions. The alternative, as we have seen with Katrina, is billions and billions of dollars in recovery costs.” The assessment district proposed by Laird and the administration — and a companion bill, ACA 13, which would have exempted the district from Proposition 218’s election requirement — went nowhere this year. After lawmakers concluded their year, state Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata (D-Oakland) restated his intention to pursue a large bond that would fund levee improvements, in addition to transportation and port projects. Gov. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, urged the federal government to provide $90 million that Congress authorized last year for California flood protection. Schwarzenegger recommended most of the money be spent on projects near Sacramento, which, the governor noted, has the lowest level of flood protection of any major urban area in the country. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) also urged the Army Corps of Engineers to pony up the money approved by Congress “If we don’t address this problem, we may suffer the same fate as Louisiana — it’s just a matter of time,” Feinstein and Pombo wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers. “A massive Delta levee failure could severely harm the area’s farms, its rapidly growing towns and the majority of the state’s water supply, which passes through the Delta.” Underlying everything, of course, is the issue of land use in flood-prone areas. Laird called land use “an incredibly thorny issue,” but one that must be addressed at some point. “There is a significant number of people both inside and outside the Legislature that are asking the question of whether we should be building thousands of homes that on their best days have 100-year flood protection,” Laird said. Members of the Reclamation Board are among the people asking that question. In September, the board approved a policy for the agency to comment on development proposed in areas protected by levees. The Reclamation Board has commented only selectively in the past, but will now start sending standard letters to every city and county reviewing projects behind levees, said Steve Bradley, the board’s chief engineer. “It’s not just 1 or 10 or 100 houses anymore. It’s 10,000,” Bradley said of the scope of development in the flood-prone areas. “We’re getting tons of development going on right behind our levees. People are thinking these levees are providing more protection than we think they are. A lot of these levees have never been certified.” The issue is not simply the height of levees, Bradley said, it is their structural stability. In fact, most of the major Central Valley floods during the last 20 years resulted from levee failure, not from water overtopping a levee. The Central Valley and the Delta have something on the order of 1,600 miles of levees, many of which were built during the early 20th Century with little engineering and from whatever material was available. The Reclamation Board’s interest in local land use, however, stirred up a great deal of controversy. Less than two weeks after the board approved its new policy, Schwarzenegger replaced the entire board with seven new members. Still, the former Reclamation Board members are not the only ones with doubts about the levees. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said in August it will start requiring local governments to certify that levees in their jurisdictions can withstand a 100-year storm. If certification is not provided, FEMA will require property owners to buy flood insurance. Local governments are looking anew at the levee system. In San Joaquin County, where several rapidly growing cities rely on levees, the Board of Supervisors is scheduled to start conducting special hearings this month. San Joaquin County Supervisor Jack Sieglock said he wants a complete study of the levee system’s governance, funding and stability. San Joaquin County has no fewer than 51 reclamation districts that are responsible for levees. The county needs to consider whether governance options are needed, Sieglock said. “This is an opportune time. The Legislature is paying attention. People are paying attention,” Sieglock said. “This is important to the entire state, not just to San Joaquin County or Stockton.” Indeed, a major levee failure in the Delta could cause a saltwater intrusion that shuts down the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project for an extended period. Some experts have predicted that a major Delta levee failure, possibly caused by an earthquake, is more likely than not before 2050. Contacts: Assemblyman John Laird, (916) 319-2027. Steve Bradley, State Reclamation Board, (916) 574-0609. San Joaquin County Supervisor Jack Sieglock, (209) 468-3113. Department of Water Resources: water.ca.gov

Forty years ago, the Watts riots shattered the postwar illusion of California as a middle-class paradise. Combined with other events, the Watts riots led to the political demise of Gov. Pat Brown, the rise of Ronald Reagan, and – sometimes overlooked – the end of California’s investment in massive public works projects designed to benefit the middle class. Construction of the aqueduct and freeway systems continued for another few years and then sputtered out. For the vaunted University of California, 1965 definitely marked the end of an era. The Santa Cruz and Riverside campuses opened that fall, less than a month after the Watts riots. Given the dramatic expansion of the system during the previous 20 years, no one could have predicted that those campuses would be the last. The last, that is, until now. In September, just a month after the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots, the University of California, Merced, opened its doors to students for the first time. UC Merced is not the first new college campus in California since the ’60s. The Cal State system has opened campuses in Monterey, Ventura, and San Diego counties during the last 15 years, though two campuses were built on a closed military base and a closed mental hospital, respectively. But the new UC campus does mark the first time in 40 years that a public research university – with all the expectations about academic geniuses and business spin-offs – has been built from scratch in California. And it’s the first one ever in the San Joaquin Valley. For the Valley, UC Merced holds two promises. The first is that it will be an economic engine for the entire region. The second is that it will signal the end of an era of backward suburbanization – houses first, jobs last – that has characterized Valley growth over the past 30 years. The Valley can be divided roughly into two pieces: the north, which increasingly attracts Bay Area commuters but struggles to win Bay Area jobs; and the south, which is still an agricultural empire but battles poverty and social problems with little success – California’s version of Appalachia. Geographically, UC Merced sits at almost the precise intersection of these two sections of the San Joaquin Valley – the spot where the job-poor commuter north meets the impoverished agricultural south. So how much difference can UC Merced make to either – or both? Let’s take regional economics first. For generations, talented Valley natives have migrated elsewhere – principally the Bay Area and Los Angeles – for top-notch educations. Once they have hooked onto the coastal economic engines, they have rarely come back. This has been a vicious cycle in the Valley: Talented people leave and don’t come back. Most of the remaining folks are poor and/or poorly educated. Those who can lift themselves out of poverty do so by leaving. In theory, UC Merced can help break that cycle by giving Valley natives a place to learn – and by drawing outside talent and resources into the Valley. The economic development literature is filled with stories about the major research university that served as the catalyst for a regional economic miracle – MIT, the University of North Carolina, the University of Texas, Stanford, UC Irvine, UC San Diego. There is tremendous pressure on UC Merced to create a similar economic miracle, especially given the rapid transformation of Austin, Orange County, and San Diego into worldwide economic powerhouses largely because of the presence of public research universities. But all of these universities are located in regions with other major assets – wealth, climate, a cluster of other universities, a state capital. Merced has none of these other assets. It must surely have the lowest median income, the highest unemployment rate, and the lowest level of educational attainment of any college town in America outside of an urban core. There are three core academic areas in place already: engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences/humanities/arts. Of these, the engineering program is clearly meant to be the potential economic driver, providing focus on high-tech and biotech. The Long-Range Development Plan also calls for the early creation of a graduate school of management that will focus on both business administration and public policy, and will offer a joint engineering/management degree. The first two research centers established were the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and the World Cultures Institute (which will focus on mobility and migration). Both are well-suited for a San Joaquin Valley university and both will draw some outside resources. But neither is likely to create vast spin-off enterprises. In short, an economic miracle might take a while. UC Merced will play a research and education role, but this is not the foundation for an economic powerhouse. The second area in which UC Merced holds promise is in serving as a model for urban development that takes advantage of the front-end creation of a job center. Although the campus is located adjacent to the City of Merced, the university has taken a modified “new town” approach – partly by design and partly by necessity. The idea of a campus as a new town is an old one, and UC Merced’s Long-Range Development Plan goes out of its way to glom on to this idea, referencing not only Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia but also Frederick Law Olmsted’s notion that the UC Berkeley campus should be a new town away from San Francisco. Even so, when the Merced site was selected, university regents received a great deal of criticism for picking a site that was just far enough away from an existing city (six miles) to create a lot of sprawl but not far enough away to permit the creation of a truly new town. Over time, the actual campus was moved a little closer to town – partly because of environmental concerns – while UC and the donating landowners (two interlocking land trusts that provide college scholarships to local kids) worked together to plan not just a campus but a “university community” (see , January 2003; , April 2001). The plan looks good on paper. The campus itself will abut Lake Yosemite, and the campus and the surrounding community will play off each other in very traditional fashion through a collection of grid street systems set off from one another. The campus itself will be based on one grid set at an oblique angle. The community surrounding it – expected to include not just housing but also 2 million square feet of commercial and industrial space – will be set on a traditional north-south/east-west grid. If the plan is implemented as envisioned, UC Merced will be 2010’s New Urbanist answer to William Pereira’s 1960s suburban vision at UC Irvine. The Merced plan mimics the layout of the old railroad towns along Highway 99, where the downtown was usually built on a straight grid, surrounded by residential neighborhoods on an oblique or modified grid. More problematic is the connection between the university complex and the existing city of Merced. The new campus will undoubtedly invigorate Merced economically. It will become a college town. But it’s not clear whether the campus will reinvigorate all of Merced’s neighborhoods or simply draw development interest northeast out of town toward the campus, leaving poor neighborhoods behind. Whatever the outcome, the university is far better what could have been built on farmland surrounding Merced, because the alternative would almost certainly be suburban subdivisions. It’s unlikely that another new town on the scale of UC Merced will be planned in the San Joaquin Valley any time soon, but by reinvigorating some native urban design ideas, the campus might influence future urban development patterns up and down the Valley. So: Economic progress, yes. Economic miracle, no. Good urban design, yes. A revolution in Valley development patterns – um, probably not. Even so, it’s hard not to think that UC Merced is the best thing that has happened in the San Joaquin Valley since most of us were born.

A controversial decision that cast doubt on many mobile home rent control ordinances in California has been thrown out. Last year, a divided Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled the City of Cotati’s mobile home rent control law was unconstitutional because it potentially permitted mobile home owners to capture a premium — based on the value of the reduced rent — when they sold their homes. The court characterized this as a transfer of equity that caused the ordinance to fail the “substantially advances” test for determining whether a regulation intended serve a legitimate state interest amounts to a taking (see , October 2004; , September 2004). The court based its decision on three Ninth Circuit rent control decisions from Hawaii. However, the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned one of those cases, specifically ruling “the substantially advances formula is not a valid takings test.” That decision came in , 125 S. Ct. 2074 (see , July 2005). After the decision, the Ninth Circuit withdrew its earlier decision and upheld Cotati’s mobile home rent control ordinance. The case is , No. 03-15066, 2005 DJDAR 8511.

By the time I actually met Ed Bacon in person, the legendary urban planner who died last week at the age of 95, he was already in his late 80s, cranky and quirky. He had just read my book , which reminded him that I had written a magazine article many years before that he had liked. He called me up out of the blue one day to discuss whether I should write – or help write – a biography of his life. I was flattered that this legend of urban planning contacted me and agreed to meet with him on my next East Coast trip. Only later did I realize that I was not alone. Ed Bacon had flattered any number of writers over the years with exactly the same offer, and no one had ever made a writing deal with him. So I visited him at his Rittenhouse Square house in Philadelphia. He proved to be chatty, charming, strongminded – even obsessive. The centerpiece of the house was an elaborate model on the third floor of his vision for how to improve Independence Mall. Characteristically incensed that the city’s planners had proposed a plan he didn’t like, he built the model at his own expense to prove his idea was better. He had fought the city’s plan so hard that the planners of the day regarded him to be cantankerous almost to the point of being a gadfly. This was classic Bacon. Bacon was born in Philadelphia in 1910 and was trained as an architect in the beaux-arts style at Cornell during the late 1920s – “I was there before the Modernists arrived,” he once told me. His zenith came during the 1950s and ’60s, when as executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission he engaged in the most successful urban revitalization efforts of the era. He razed eight square blocks around Independence Hall to create a more formalistic setting, reviving the neighboring historical neighborhood of Society Hill in the process. He tore down the “Chinese Wall” – a large railroad bridge next to Philadelphia City Hall – to make room for the Penn Center office complex. And he rejected architect Louis Kahn’s starkly modernist plan for the downtown. Bacon had a way of coming across as naïve, but he accomplished things no one so naïve could have done. He was part of a political reform movement that pulled Philadelphia out of the machine era; and he helped rewrite the city charter in a way that gave the Planning Commission – and, hence, him – more power than in almost any other city. He once told me that he did it by writing policies that would kick in far in the future, beyond the time horizon of all the politicians. More than anything, however, he succeeded because he had an artist’s vision and a monarch’s will. His vision was the city as the experience of moving through space – a path or a shaft – and most of his plans used this idea as the focal point. His idea of an implementation technique was to use the force of a will so strong that he seemed unable to separate Philadelphia from himself. The first chapter of his classic book is titled “The City as an Act of Will.” In our first conversation at his house, he suggested that, having written a book about Los Angeles called , I should now write a book about Philadelphia called . “Acquiescent to whom?” I asked. He looked at me in disbelief. How could I not know? “Why, to , of course,” he replied. Tethered to such a strong personal vision and a strong personal will, Bacon did not seem to notice or care about the city’s changing demographics, or the growing significance of race and class in planning discussions, and eventually this made his seem old-fashioned and out of date. Bacon’s decline began in the mid 1960s, when he went toe-to-toe with advocacy planners such as Paul Davidoff over the proposed construction of a freeway on the edge of Society Hill. The freeway would have required the demolition of the black neighborhood adjacent to increasingly tony Society Hill. Bacon, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school, favored the freeway; Davidoff, who taught in the Penn planning school, opposed it. Davidoff won and Bacon lost, thus setting off a trend in advocacy planning and a corresponding decline in physical planning that lasted until the New Urbanists emerged a quarter-century later. (Another side effect of this battle was that my brother, who for many years ran a retail beer store on Bainbridge Street called “Society Hill Beverage,” had to stock an extremely wide range of beers to meet the diverse market demand in the surrounding neighborhoods.) Even today, 40 years later, almost all planning students read Davidoff’s classic article, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.” But not very many of them read . The New Urbanists revived Bacon’s reputation to a certain extent; is on every New Urbanist reading list because Bacon’s physical determinism and his formalistic design impulses jibe with New Urbanist thinking. Oddly, however, even the New Urbanists don’t really talk all that much about Bacon’s accomplishments. I think that’s because most of his urban design ideas, such as Penn Center, were implemented during the height of the Modernist era, and New Urbanists having a hard time admitting that good urban design can be created in a Modernist style. But Penn Center good – not perfect, but an excellent example of experiencing a city by moving through space, constructed at a time when such accomplishments were rare. It stands as a perpetual reminder that Modernist architecture and bad urban design don’t always go together. I once asked Bacon why, given the force of his will and the breadth of his vision, he went along with Modernism in revitalizing downtown Philadelphia. And the great idealist gave me a surprisingly pragmatic answer. “I wouldn’t have chosen it,” he said, “but it was what I had available to me at the time.” I went to planning school at the height of the advocacy planning era and consequently gained almost no formal education in design. But I spent a lot of time in Philadelphia during the ’70s, before I moved to Los Angeles, and so in a way I learned my urban design inside Bacon’s mind. Many years later, when urbanism old and new came back into style, I was thankful that that I had this education to fall back on.

The Ninth Circuit has declined to decide a takings case brought by developers whose property the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) has acquired through eminent domain for economic development. M&A Gabaee, a partnership of real estate developers, owns the two properties on East Slauson Avenue where the CRA wants to develop a shopping center. However, in December 2003, CRA signed a development agreement with Slauson Central to develop the sites. The CRA then started separate eminent domain processes for the two properties. M&A Gabaee responded by suing in federal court, arguing that taking the property for economic development was not a valid use of eminent domain authority. (In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its most controversial land use decision in years when it ruled that the government may use eminent domain for economic development purposes.) However, the Ninth Circuit declined to hear M&A Gabaee’s argument, ruling that the federal courts should abstain because there is a parallel action in state court. The landowner pointed out that it filed a second federal lawsuit one day before the CRA commenced its second eminent domain action, and it filed its first federal lawsuit before anything of substance had happened yet with the CRA’s first eminent domain suit. The court essentially turned those arguments around. What mattered, the court ruled, was that state court action was ongoing with regard to one property, and nothing of substance had happened in the second federal lawsuit when the CRA started condemnation proceedings for the second property. Because that was the situation, federal courts must abstain, the Ninth Circuit ruled. The case is , No. 04-55888, 05 C.D.O.S. 7332, 2005 DJDAR 9993. Filed August 17, 2005.

Ten years ago , conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta were grim. Fish populations were crashing, forcing shutdowns of the giant pumps that send fresh water south from the Delta to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities. The levees protecting those critical pumps were in danger of collapsing. And a giant tug-of-war was under way between urban agencies, rural irrigation districts, environmentalists, farmers and fisheries experts over who was to blame. Out of that tumult was born the Cal-Fed Bay-Delta Program, intended as a mechanism for collaboration among those interest groups on an ambitious program of water-supply and ecological restoration projects. Ten years and $3 billion later, here’s where things stand in the Delta today: Fish populations are crashing. the levees protecting the huge state and federal pumps are in danger of collapsing, and a tug-of-war is brewing between urban agencies, rural irrigation districts, environmentalists, farmers and fisheries experts over who is to blame. The seeming lack of progress has not gone unnoticed. As it begins its second decade, Cal-Fed is suffering an identity crisis, and critics are multiplying. Many are the same policy experts and political leaders who originally championed the unusual state-federal partnership as a welcome alternative to litigation and bureaucratic paralysis — a paralysis they now believe has infected Cal-Fed itself. “If I had do sum up why I believe Cal-Fed has strayed from its course,” former Gov. Pete Wilson said during an August 25 hearing in Sacramento, “it would be: Process has replaced leadership.” The rumblings of concern have reached a crescendo thanks to an odd coincidence of natural and political events. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger kicked things off with his $115.7 billion May revise of the state budget, in which he outlined a three-point plan to revitalize Cal-Fed, including an independent review of the program and development of a long-term financing plan. He followed that up with a June 22 letter to the state’s Little Hoover Commission, asking it to recommend improvements to the Cal-Fed governance structure. Former Gov. Wilson was one of several current and former officials with direct Cal-Fed involvement to testify at the first of three hearings convened by the Commission. Other speakers included Lester Snow, the former executive director of Cal-Fed who now heads the state Department of Water Resources, and Bruce Babbitt, who signed the original Cal-Fed agreement when he served as interior secretary under President Clinton. “At the outset, we clearly anticipated this process would yield major progress in two areas: finding and developing the sites and infrastructure for increasing surface storage, and making large investments in modernizing and updating the Delta infrastructure,” Babbitt told the commissioners. “The program has not met those expectations.” Snow, however, defended Cal-Fed against the mounting criticism. “Saying Cal-Fed is a failure — that’s pure hyperbole,” Snow told the Little Hoover Commission. “Cal-Fed was not designed to resolve all of the state’s water problem. It was designed to solve conflicts in the Bay-Delta system, and it is doing that.” “The last 10 years,” Snow added, “have been remarkably free to lawsuits related to management of the Bay-Delta system because most stakeholders have viewed collaboration as more constructive and proactive than litigation.” Snow’s more positive assessment has become rare in Sacramento. The Legislature, not wanting to be outdone by the administration, conducted its own hearings on conditions in the Delta. One was convened August 23 by Sen. Mike Machado (D-Linden) who chairs the Senate Natural Resources and Water subcommittee on the Delta. Another, on the same day as the Little Hoover Commission’s hearing, was conducted by Assemblyman Lois Wolk (D-Davis), chair of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee. Both hearings focused on evidence of continuing ecological problems in the Delta, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars invested by Cal-Fed. Recent surveys show continuing and severe population decline among key Delta fish species, including striped bass, threadfin shad, delta smelt and longfin smelt, along with a variety of zooplankton that serves as an important food source for the fish. A team of state and federal biologists is trying to figure out why. Although operation of the Delta pumps that move water south has long been regarded as having a deleterious effect on fish, researchers say there is no clear statistical link between pump operation and numbers of fish. To some, that disconnect suggests a more pervasive and troubling imbalance in the Delta ecosystem. “We have learned a tremendous amount about the Delta in the past five years and most of it is really bad news,” said Steve Hall, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. It took nature to deliver the worst news of all. When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in late August, breaching the levees protecting New Orleans and turning that coastal city into a modern-day Atlantis, it led to renewed warnings about the threat of a similar disaster in the Delta, where 1,100 miles of fragile earthen dikes protect a region that lies mostly below sea level. As California water and flood managers warned in a spate of post-Katrina op-ed pieces and news stories, collapse of multiple Delta levees after a major earthquake or winter storm likely would force shutdown of the huge pumps that feed the State Water Project and Central Valley Project. Such a collapse has a 2-in-3 chance of occurring in the next 45 years, experts warn. Little has been done to safeguard against such an event, although one of Cal-Fed’s chief goals is improvement of the Delta levee system. “I think that the dire and urgent nature of the threat is really now beginning to dawn in policy makers here in Sacramento,” Hall said. Several of those who testified before the Little Hoover Commission pinpointed where they believe Cal-Fed has gone astray. Most agreed that the peculiar structure of the program — “an odd creature that only a mother could love,” former California Resources Secretary Mary Nichols called it — contributes to confusion and inertia. Overseen by the California Bay Delta Authority (CBDA), which has no authority over the state and federal agencies responsible for water projects and environmental regulation, the program is funded piecemeal by periodic and unpredictable congressional appropriations, bond measures and state budget allocations. The biggest single weakness in the program is the failure of Cal-Fed administrators to recognize the financial limitations facing the state and federal governments and to decide which of the many Delta projects are of highest priority, said Bennet Raley, former assistant secretary for water and science in the U.S. Department of Interior. “To be blunt, I lost confidence in Cal-Fed when it essentially refused to develop budgets that recognized unavoidable fiscal realities,” Raley told the Little Hoover Commission. “You can shoot the messenger, but that will not change the harsh reality that CBDA must evolve away from an organization that acts as if infinite funding will magically appear into one that is able to prioritize and effectively spend whatever funding is provided.” The commission is expected to submit its report to the governor in November. Contacts: Steve Hall, Association of California Water Agencies, (916) 441-4545. Lester Snow, Department of Water Resources, (916) 653-7007. Little Hoover Commission: lhc.ca.gov

The California Supreme Court has accepted a case in which a deal between the State Lands Commission and the City of Long Beach was halted by an appellate court. At issue is a complicated land swap. Nearly 100 years ago, the city acquired tidelands from the state. By law, tidelands are covered by the “public trust doctrine” and can have limited, public uses. Over time, the city filled in the tidelands, which lie between downtown and the waterfront. The property in question is three acres of filled tidelands, on which the city sought retail development as part of a major redevelopment project. The city in 2001 approved a multi-screen cinema, an arcade and other retail uses on the site. Project opponents argued that the development, known as Pike at Rainbow Harbor, violated the public trust doctrine. The State Lands Commission suggested that it agreed with the project opponents. So the Commission removed the three acres from the public trust and, in exchange, placed 10 acres of city-owned land along the Los Angeles River in the public trust. Project opponents sued, and the Third District Court of Appeal ruled that the deal violated the state law that permits the exchange of land covered by the tidelands public trust doctrine (see , July 2005). The city and Developers Diversified Realty, which built Pike at Rainbow Harbor, appealed to the Supreme Court. The court has framed the question before it this way: “Does Public Resources Code § 6307 permit an exchange of land only when the exchange will serve any of the trust purposes designated in the statute with respect to the land that is currently subject to the public trust, or does the statute also permit an exchange when the exchange will serve any of the designated purposes with respect to the land that is to be acquired and that will become subject to the public trust as a result of the exchange?” The case is , No. S134300. Opening briefs are due this month.