When deciding whether to award a public litigant its attorneys' fees against another public entity under Code of Civil Procedure section 1021.5, the trial court may only consider the public litigant's "pecuniary interests and the pecuniary interests of its constituents" in determining the third requirement of that statute.  The court may not consider the nonpecuniary motives of the public litigant in bringing the lawsuit.

Here’s a CEQA Catch-22 for you:

In a ruling critical to moving forward Sacramento's downtown basketball arena, the Third District Court of Appeal has given the City of Sacramento a clean win in a wide-ranging CEQA challenge brought by a group of individual environmentalists.

The environmental review for a proposed Sacramento housing project that apparently conflicted with planned unit development zoning for the site was inadequate, an appellate court has ruled. Instead of adopting a mitigated negative declaration, the City of Sacramento should have prepared an environmental impact report that addressed the conflict between the project and the PUD's objectives, the court ruled.

Rarely does anything with a lawn, a photovoltaic canopy, a “great lawn," no fewer than 13 design collaborators, and an estimated $50 million budget, qualify as simple. But, relative to its competitors, that’s exactly what the winning design in the Pershing Square Renew competition is.

In a split decision, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has upheld the Coastal Commission's conditions on two property owners' reconstruction of a seawall in Encinitas after it was destroyed in a storm, including limiting the new seawall's permit to a 20-year term.

In a case that would appear on its face to conflict with a different appellate ruling filed just two weeks ago, the Sixth District Court of Appeal has ruled that a groundwater pump charge is a property-related charge subject to Proposition 218.

The First District Court of Appeal has argued that Humbolt County did not create a taking of property by requiring the owners of a mobile home underneath an airport flight path to provide an overflight easement in exchange for a permit to build a carport and porch that had been illegally built by the previous owners of the property.

The California Supreme Court has agreed to review an appellate ruling that Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity and similar "online travel companies" (OTCs) did not have to pay San Diego hotel tax on income they derived using a "merchant model" approach to marketing local hotel rooms. The Second District ruled that if an OTC contracts with a hotel for a block of rooms at a fixed wholesale rate, and then retails them to guests at higher prices, then city hotel tax is due only on the wholesale rate, not the difference the OTC receives. The case is In Re Transient Occupancy Tax Cases , also referred to as City of San Diego v. Priceline . It addresses a coordinated group of cases involving several online hotel room brokers. The Second District decision, as amended on rehearing March 27, is at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B243800A.PDF. The ruling looks back strongly to two prior cases in Santa Monica and Anaheim, as shown in the Second District's online docket at http://bit.ly/UPLUTn. The Supreme Court online docket is at http://bit.ly/1soYBAy. For further details see http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3464. The League of California Cities posted a comment welcoming the review decision, which it had supported in an amicus letter, at http://bit.ly/1o88aV9.

California State University East Bay undertook a dual-purpose environmental impact report for its campus master plan and two construction projects, meant to enable the campus to grow from roughly 12,000 to 18,000 students in the next 30 years. The construction projects consisted of a housing complex and a parking structure. The EIR included alternatives at both the master plan and construction project level. The City of Hayward and public interest groups filed suit challenging the sufficiency of the EIR, apparently out of concern for costs that it might bear, such as those for fire and safety, when the university expands. The trial court found the EIR to be deficient and issued an order granting the petition for writ. The university subsequently appealed. With the exception of one issue, the appellate court reversed the trial court in City of Hayward v. Trustees of the California State University, generally upholding the sufficiency of the EIR. The appellate decision provides helpful guidance in the use of a programmatic EIR (for the master plan) and recognizes that despite the somewhat predictable claim of the project opponents that more detail should have been included in the programmatic document, that those details were properly left for the next CEQA tier. The appellate court found that substantial evidence supported the conclusion that the construction of an additional fire station would have less than significant impacts as the anticipated construction of a station in an urban setting was not anticipated to cause impact. Notably, the appellate court concluded that the lead agency was not required to mitigate for the socio-economic impacts such as station staffing. The court wrote, "The need for additional fire protection services is not an environmental impact that CEQA requires a project proponent to mitigate ." With respect to traffic impacts, the master plan EIR was a programmatic EIR, and was not required to analyze neighborhood street impacts as those impacts would be analyzed in conjunction with the next CEQA review and consideration of specific projects, which would be the basis for more detailed evaluation. A mitigation requirement for a transportation demand management program did not result in deferred mitigation, as the mitigation measure included a required performance standard. However, there was a lack of substantial evidence to support the EIR's conclusion that the impacts to area parks would be less than significant and on that basis the matter was remanded back for additional analysis as part of a revised EIR. The Case: City of Hayward v. Trustees of the California State University  (.pdf) (June 28, 2012, A131412) ___Cal.App.4th ___; 2012 Cal.App. LEXIS 761

A city council that is not paying attention during a quasi-judicial land use hearing does not provide due process to a permit applicant, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled.

If the oral argument is any indication, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to rule against a landowner in Florida who filed a takings lawsuit against an Orlando-area water district – turning what appeared to be an easy victory for property rights advocates into a loss.