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 .

Punching a hole in the faith local governments and developers in California have placed in habitat conservation plans, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that federal wildlife agencies retain the discretion to designate additional land as critical habitat even after an HCP has been approved.

George Skelton, the venerable Los Angeles Times political columnist, recently came out in favor  of Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to eliminate redevelopment. Skelton's Exhibit #1 is the Dive Bar, a hangout on derelict K Street in downtown Sacramento that is now one of the city's hottest night spots -- complete with a mermaid tank -- thanks partly to the redevelopment subsidies provided to the project's developer.

So, redevelopment is back, sort of. How much of a difference it will make remains to be seen.

For the moment, equilibrium has been more or less restored in rivalry between Northern California and Southern California � at least as far as urban planning goes.

The Strategic Growth Council staff has proposed using $30 million in new money to provide additional funding for projects that didn't make the cut or weren't fully funded by the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program last year.

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in its environmental baseline for a shopping center renovation, the Fourth District Court of Appeals has ruled in an unpublished case.

The City of San Clemente must refund $10 million in beach parking impact fees accumulated over a 20-year period because it did not build parking facilities with the money nor make the necessary findings under the Mitigation Fee Act to retain the money for more than five years, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled.

If there's anything more confusing than one regional government bureaucracy, it's two regional government bureaucracies.

A new set of recommendations for implementing SB 743  - which would require traffic analysis to be based on vehicle miles traveled -- proposes moving many proposed significance thresholds from the legally binding CEQA guidelines to a technical advisory memo. These recommendations also call for stricter thresholds on the so-called "regional averages" and provide simpler methodologies for dealing with safety issues. The thresholds of significance are important because they often trigger an environmental impact  report.

BEVERLY HILLS, May 2, 2016 - As the saying goes, when you're holding a hammer, the world looks like a nail. What if you have a 3-D printer instead of a hammer?

Last week's unanimous, finely worded ruling by the California Supreme Court has spared builders their worst-case scenario in the long-awaited "CEQA in Reverse" case. It does not interpret the California Environmental Quality Act to require an environmental impact report whenever a project might attract more people within range of an existing hazard such as air pollution or earthquake risk.