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A challenge by dissident conservationists to the Lake Tahoe Regional Plan Update is in the hands of U.S. Judge John A. Mendez following oral arguments in Sacramento March 26. The arguments put a bookend to a fierce, prolonged exchange of court papers heavy with mutual exasperation, between parties who may disagree more utterly than most. The Sierra Club and Friends of the West Shore, plaintiffs in the litigation, are holdout critics of the 2012 Regional Plan Update (RPU), which forms the centerpiece of a major political and regulatory settlement on California and Nevada officials' shared environmental governance of the Lake Tahoe basin. (See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3435.) Based on claims that the RPU erodes previously established scientific standards, the Sierra Club plaintiffs have been contesting its validity in federal court for the past year. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), as defendant in the litigation, is being pressed to justify the work of negotiators at many levels, including some Tahoe Basin conservation leaders, who put years of effort into crafting the RPU. The Sierra Club plaintiffs depict TRPA as soft on developers; TRPA depicts the plaintiffs as destructive perfectionists. According to the Tahoe Daily Tribune (See http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/10781943-113/plan-lake-tahoe-trpa) and a statement released by TRPA, the oral arguments themselves addressed well-established themes in the briefing. Mendez will now decide competing motions for summary judgment that could very possibly end the case. Fractious briefing The lawyers exchanged indignantly phrased briefs through early 2014, taking extra bites at each other's arguments by filing oppositions to amicus briefs and judicial notice requests. TRPA's counsel tried during the last week before the hearing to gain an extra edge from two recent high-profile cases in which courts trusted agencies' judgment on environmental plans. One was Judge Jay Bybee's call for deference to administrative-branch expertise in the Ninth Circuit's Delta Smelt decision  (See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3448). The other was the California Second District's choice to accept "adaptive management" of the endangered spineflower in proposed Newhall Ranch development areas. (See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3461 and Center for Biological Diversity v. Department of Fish and Wildlife at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B245131.PDF.) Judge Mendez did not focus on the two new cases. TRPA's John Marshall answered an email query: "The recent cases were not discussed at the oral argument". Earthjustice's Wendy Park answered a parallel query: "The Judge only commented at the beginning of the hearing that argument on those two cases was not necessary since they were only marginally relevant (they'd be "the last case in a string cite")." Invited to respond to Park, TRPA spokesman Jeff Cowen wrote: "TRPA has no response to the statement." In earlier 2014 briefing, TRPA, joined in an amicus brief by the California and Nevada natural resource agencies, suggested the difficulty and extent of the bi-state public process that created the RPU was itself an argument for the RPU's validity. Plaintiffs countered that the court's review was limited to the legality of TRPA's proceedings and the adequacy of supporting evidence. In late February the plaintiffs quoted a warning out of Laurel Heights v. UC Regents , 47 Cal.3d 376 (1988), against the risk that "bureaucratic and financial momentum" would overrun "environmental concerns that could be dealt with more easily at an early stage." Otherwise TRPA continued to defend the Regional Plan Update as a pragmatic shift toward regulation via incentives for environmental retrofitting and reduction of ground coverage via denser redevelopment. Supporters of the RPU have argued that its new frameworks for regulation are based on scientific advances and physical changes in the lake basin's environmental needs that have appeared since the prior Regional Plan's 1987 approval. (See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3435.) Disputes in the 2014 briefing included whether the RPU would provide adequately for ongoing enforcement of required Best Management Practices (BMP) on developed properties, and whether the lake's Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) standards would be either strict enough or sufficiently enforceable, especially on the Nevada side and in areas where local jurisdictions would be taking over enforcement tasks. In an argument that TRPA may have meant to answer by quoting the Newhall Ranch spineflower decision, the plaintiffs claimed in a January brief that TRPA's "adaptive management" approach to BMP enforcement "amounts to possibly reacting to worsened conditions (in an unspecified manner)" instead of getting ahead of them. TRPA retorted in its papers that the standards were real, sufficient and sufficiently enforceable to improve on current conditions, complaining meanwhile that "Plaintiffs persist in failing to distinguish between TRPA's BMP Retrofit Program for existing legacy development, and BMPs required for new development or redevelopment." TRPA further accused plaintiffs of "ignoring an overwhelming scientific and technical consensus" supporting the TMDL "load reduction credits" system of regulation, and of cherry-picking both laws and regulations to find fault. Plaintiffs argued in their series of briefs that TRPA hadn't sufficiently studied the true likely effects on runoff and soil from the RPU's incentives for developers to restore properties in fragile areas and transfer development credits to town center areas. TRPA accused plaintiffs of shifting ground improperly by leading with a water quality analysis in their opening brief, then shifting emphasis to soil conservation arguments in later papers. TRPA argued the EIS had met the necessary standard on soil conservation because it modeled and analyzed "potential impacts on nutrient cycling" and discussed effects on vegetation and on fish habitat. Plaintiffs wrote that "'Redevelopment' Means More Development" and predicted the RPU would allow "183 more acres of coverage region-wide" and that "the transfer of 960 development rights from... undeveloped and undevelopable parcels to developable parcels located in centers" would increase overall construction. Plaintiffs disagreed with a group of business and real estate amici on whether a new "resort recreation" designation of 315 acres of prior "recreation" lands at the Edgewood and Heavenly resort properties would expand urban boundaries. On the contrary, in its press statement about the March 26 oral arguments, TRPA reiterated its position that "The Regional Plan will result in less impervious land coverage in the Basin, more open space, and will accelerate the removal of legacy land coverage from sensitive lands." As for ozone monitoring, said by the plaintiffs to be neglected under the RPU (their January brief said there were no monitors at all in South Lake Tahoe), TRPA replied in its papers that the RPU would reduce vehicle use, that auto emissions standards have caused ozone levels to decline, and that more monitoring is not required by law. TRPA's statement quoted Executive Director Joanne Marchetta as saying, "We all want Lake Tahoe to continue to be one of the most protected watersheds in the nation and our plan will do that... This litigation boils down to how we balance strong environmental protections with the need to upgrade existing development that is impacting the Lake." The Tahoe Daily Tribune reported Judge Mendez took the case under submission without specifying a date for his decision.

The proposed 60,000-population Newhall Ranch development began a recent winning streak with an LA Superior Court ruling Jan. 31 on water supply adequacy and greenouse gases in the project's Phase 1 EIR – as reported in a Santa Clarita Valley Signal news story whose comments section reflects fierce local debate: http://www.signalscv.com/section/36/article/113952/. In another decision that supports the project, the Castaic Lake Water Agency's recent acquisition of the Valencia Water Company received a PUC approval in February per documents made available at http://bit.ly/1j90b8v by an opponent of both decisions, Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment (SCOPE). In early March, environmental and tribal groups filed a federal suit contesting Clean Water Act approvals by the Army Corps of Engineers and EPA based on potential environmental effects and potential intrusion on Chumash heritage and burial sites. For details see the LA Times at http://lat.ms/1gDxhW8 and the site of one of the plaintiffs, Friends of the Santa Clara River, at http://www.fscr.org/html/newhall.html. And then on March 20 California's Second District Court of Appeal backed the Newhall Land and Farming Co. by upholding a state Fish and Wildlife environmental impact statement that favors the project over objections from a similar group of plaintiffs, who said they would likely seek state Supreme Court review. The decision is at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B245131.PDF and further details at http://lat.ms/1imoY5D. Water board adjusts flow in farmers' favor but zero allocation still predicted Over environmentalists' objections, the State Water Board issued orders March 18 allowing more Delta water to flow to farmers, and less out of the Delta, though it did not end the zero allocation forecasts of the Department of Water Resources and Bureau of Reclamation. The Sacramento Bee has details at http://bit.ly/PPsr3o. The orders themselves are on the State Water Resources Control Board site at http://bit.ly/1esWgiI. Also in the news: The California State University system has chosen not to build a new campus at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. The Contra Costa Times has news of other redevelopment plans at http://bit.ly/Nxi1DX. Los Angeles City Planning released its Draft Mobility Plan in mid-February, opening a comment period that ends May 13, 2014. See http://la2b.org/. The L.A. Dept. of Water and Power, Sacramento and parts of the Metropolitan Water District are all paying homeowners to remove their lawns. See, respectively, http://lat.ms/1nCGjqV, http://bit.ly/1jRKxex and http://www.socalwatersmart.com/index.php/qualifyingproducts/turfremoval. San Francisco's Measure B, which would subject all future waterfront height limit variances to referenda, survived a court challenge, keeping its place on the June 3 county ballot, but its campaign manager, Jon Golinger, was in hot water for trying to become the author of the official arguments both for and against the measure that he in fact supported. See http://bit.ly/1lVgxPt and http://bit.ly/1d6oama. The L.A. Board of Supervisors has approved the proposed Local Coastal Program (LCP) for the Santa Monica Mountains, which has languished in part-drafted form since 1986. As the Malibu Times reports at http://bit.ly/1iJf8LX, Zev Yaroslavsky wrote a furious response to local critics at http://zev.lacounty.gov/blog/exposing-a-mountain-of-deceit. The plan still awaits final Coastal Commission adoption. For the LCP see http://planning.lacounty.gov/coastal.

We're pretty sure at this point that the California Environmental Quality Act does not apply to itself. (www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3395). But we're still not quite sure whether CEQA applies "in reverse." Does it require developers to consider not just their projects' effects on the environment, but also the potential effects on their projects from environmental hazards like landslides, earthquakes, or rising sea levels? By appealing the same case that concluded, "CEQA does not apply to CEQA," the California Building Industry Association (CBIA) is hoping to resolve that issue once and for all. And if it doesn't , then we might have to go back to actually planning . Of all the bizarre feedback loops built into CEQA, the idea that the law might apply to itself is certainly one of the weirdest of all. The First District Court of Appeal knocked that idea down last summer in California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District , 218 Cal.App.4th 1171, by ruling that the Bay Area air district's significance thresholds are not subject to a CEQA analysis. But in so doing, the First District ducked the other bizarre CEQA question we're all facing today: Namely, does CEQA apply "in reverse"? CBIA appealed the First District ruling to the Supreme Court – which took the case primarily to resolve that issue. "CEQA-In-Reverse" simply means this: We all know that CEQA is supposed to apply to a project's impacts on the environment. But does it also apply to the environment's impact on the project? That is, if a project would place people in the way of harm because of a pre-existing environmental problem – or, more to the point, a potential future problem – does the CEQA analysis have to cover that? Do applicants have to mitigate that possible problem? Can projects be turned down on that basis? We all thought we knew the answer: No. In maybe the most important CEQA case in the last few years, the Second District Court of Appeal ruled in 2011 that CEQA does not require an analysis of the environment on the project. In Ballona Wetlands Land Trust v. City of Los Angeles (www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3121), 201 Cal.App. 4th 455, the First District ruled that the CEQA analysis of the Playa Vista project near Venice did not have to include an analysis of sea-level rise, for the simple reason that sea-level rise isn't caused by the project. In Ballona Wetlands , the court specifically took the state to task for the language of CEQA Guidelines Section 15126.2(a), which said that if a project was proposed to be constructed on a previously identified earthquake fault – thus putting people in harm's way – the potential danger had to be addressed in the CEQA analysis. In concept, Ballona Wetlands makes sense. It's a pretty well-established constitutional principle that you can't make developers mitigate more than their fair share of the problems they create. So it stands to reason that they should have no responsibility for problems that they have nothing to do with. Except why would you deliberately put people in harm's way by building a project in a dangerous location? Surely, if there is any purpose to planning at all, it is to eliminate the possibility that people will be harmed or killed because a development project is washed away or crumbles to the ground because of an earthquake. Indeed, this was the reason why – in the end – Los Angeles County eventually won the infamous First English Lutheran Church case back in the 1980s. Sure, it was possible, as the Supreme Court said (at 482 U.S. 304), for regulation to create a temporary taking. But in the end, L.A. County prevailed because rebuilding the First English church camp in Tujunga Canyon wasn't safe. Concern for public safety was also why CEQA practitioners around the state were having trouble with Ballona Wetlands – it went against their basic understanding of why we do planning at all. Nevertheless, it appeared to be settled law – at least until the CBIA v. BAAQMD case came along and implicitly (though not explicitly) reversed it. We'll see what the Supreme Court does. So, on the face of it, the end of "CEQA-In-Reverse" doesn't make sense. But no matter what the Supreme Court says, the truth of the matter is that it's a perfectly reasonable position to take under CEQA. And it might remind us that we're fundamentally in the business of planning, not CEQA analysis. In California, we often use CEQA analysis as our default method of getting a developer to do something – as if we have no other way of doing it. (In this way, CEQA's kind of like redevelopment used to be – the catch-all tool that we think is required to solve absolutely all problems.) So if we don't want a developer to build a project in an earthquake zone, or a place where sea-level rise is predicted to have an impact, then the most obvious thing to do is hit the developer with a significant impact under CEQA and take it from there. But Ballona Wetlands is right in one sense: Sea-level rise or an earthquake fault isn't the developer's fault. So if we are going to stop a developer from building in those locations, we can't do it under CEQA. We have to use actual planning. There is, for example, the Alquist-Priolo Act, which permits local governments to restrict development around earthquake faults. As the ultimate outcome of First English reminded us, there's also public health and safety, which in that case – and many others – ultimately trumped the landowner's property rights. The public health and safety power also means that planners can use zoning – for example, to restrict housing development near sources of air pollution. Sea-level rise is a trickier question, because there is no existing law to protect against it and the extent of it is pretty speculative. This is why, with Ballona Wetlands on the books, local planners are anxiously awaiting the Coastal Commission's guidance on sea-level rise. But existing regulatory mechanisms – such as health and safety findings – might give planners an important tool to protect against sea-level rise. As California planners, CEQA drives us crazy. But it also makes us lazy. Because we're so afraid of how it works, we also tend to try to use it for everything. If "CEQA-In-Reverse" doesn't survive, that might actually be a good thing. Because it might force us to actually use planning in order to plan.

A generation ago, moratoriums on new water hookups were important to the statewide land use picture in bad drought years. During 1991, new hookups were banned in some large southern and coastal California cities and all of Marin County. Santa Monica made developers mitigate new hookups by buying low-flush toilets for existing users. The Metropolitan Water District suspended annexations. Not so in 2014. As this year's drought deepens, urban water systems are in general keeping new hookups available. Not necessarily because there's more water, but thanks to improvements over the past two decades in planning and connectivity. As every day's news attests, the drought is slamming agriculture, natural habitats, and small water districts that are poor, awkwardly placed, or under-connected. Wood chips from uprooted almond trees have reportedly poured in to power plants as fuel. But meanwhile, like a cozy kitchen in a tumbledown house, the urban centers hold steady. Some urban districts that are enforcing strict conservation measures are also looking at new annexations and subdivisions without blinking. People do still ask where the water's coming from for new large developments. It seems possible, however, that drinking-water supply for expanding urban footprints may have lost some importance as grist for development debates compared with the days of the big moratoriums. This year it is rare to find municipal districts suspending new water connections specifically as a response to the current dry season. An extensive if unsystematic search by phone and Internet found only two: the posh suburb of Montecito, next door to Santa Barbara, and Willits in the parched Mendocino County interior. Some districts, mostly small, banned new hookups long before the current drought: Bolinas since 1971, Cambria since 1990, Redwood Valley, with very occasional relief, since 1989. Customers of California American Water in the Monterey Peninsula Management District are under a moratorium on water permits for new construction and remodels, addressed in a current proposed bond bill, SB 936: http://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB936/2013. Brooktrails Township – a community services district near Willits – is probably not alone in having no need to ban new connections. It has had 24 connections available since a state-imposed moratorium ended in 2010, but district staff member Elizabeth Simpson said there were no takers. Connection fees are $23,711 apiece. Other districts, including Solvang and Nipomo, have discussed moratoriums but aren't there yet. Reflecting a contrast between municipal and rural/agricultural pressures, Paso Robles has banned new private wells, including for houses, because of groundwater depletion pressures that have a lot to do with vineyards. The city has not stopped new connections to municipal pipes. Its contingency plan would impose a hookup moratorium at the strictest stage of water crisis but Planning Manager Susan DeCarli said: "That would be a long way out from here now." In the Redwood Valley County Water District of Sonoma County, general manager Bill Koehler said the district had about 120 days of stored water. He said whether it would last depended whether the vineyards that sustain the local economy required spraying for protection from more than one or two frost events in the next few weeks. And yet, the list of some 200 local conservation measures compiled by the Association of California Water Agencies at http://www.acwa.com/content/local-drought-response shows no large districts banning water for new development as of March 20. So what exactly is different since 1991? Water and infrastructure expert Ellen Hanak, co-director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California, wrote: "The difference is that there have been major strides in drought planning and resiliency investments since then. The 1987-92 drought really marked the beginning of many of the practices that have become very important for the modern approaches to modern water that most large urban agencies now subscribe to."   In an interview, Hanak said the water year (from a statewide perspective) was looking like about the fourth-driest on record, about a "30-year drought." That is, a level of drought already planned and accounted for in long-term water management plans. Her comments, and other recent PPIC publications, viewed the drought as a crisis mainly for agriculture, the environment, and remote rural towns "not connected to a larger grid". Urban systems, she said, were "mostly in very good shape during this drought" though it was further encouraging long-term planning, especially to increase physical connections among existing systems to allow sharing. Hanak recently coauthored a PPIC report on "serious funding gaps" affecting California water systems, including drinking water contamination in small, poor agricultural towns: http://ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=1086. The report saw a shortage of funds for other ordinary water management such as responses to floods, storm and other runoff, ecological conservation, and coordination among systems. In an email exchange, Hanak demurred to the blanket suggestion that urban water systems' strength might make water supply less of a constraint on growth. She wrote: "I think there's potential for things to fall more through the cracks in some places that are growing fast from a smaller base – planning and often supply diversification actions are likely to be less well-established." She declined to name any particular district as one for concern, writing that her comment was based on a statistical analysis in the mid-2000s "where we found that places that were growing faster and that had smaller water agencies were less likely to be complying fully with all the requirements of the Urban Water Management Planning Act," also noting that "communities with fewer than 3,000 service connections don't actually even need to prepare urban water management plans." Urban Water Management Plans (UWMPs) are required of more than 400 urban water districts every five years, with the next revisions due in 2015. Large new developments must additionally meet "show me the water" requirements under Senate Bills 221 and 610 of the 2001 session. An SB 610 "Water Supply Assessment" is required for any project with more than 500 housing units or hotel rooms, work space for more than 1000 people, business space on a similar scale, or a 10% increase in the local district's total hookups. The overlapping SB 221 requires "Verification of Sufficient Water Supply" for approval of a tentative map, parcel map or development agreement for a similar-sized project, with exemptions for infill or low-income housing. Both standards require water planning for the next 20 years that anticipates expected population increases and recurrences of known types of drought periods: http://www.water.ca.gov/urbanwatermanagement/SB610_SB221/. Among local development disputes it is difficult to find substantive connections being drawn between the current drought's effects and projects that have had to pass reviews under SB 610 and SB 221. Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League said requirements such as SB 221 and SB 610 are determined to be satisfied relatively easily. The laws "have had very little effect to date," he said. Despite a few court cases involving egregious cases of ignoring water supply concerns, he said developers generally have managed to satisfy authorities that a 20-year water supply exists. He said analyses for such purposes are based on "a short record" of the last 150 years, which may not reflect all possible conditions. But like Hanak, he said forecasts for frightening drought effects "overstate the reality that we're finding this year" and most urban areas would not suffer dire water shortages. City of Folsom Minton pointed to the "very development-friendly" city of Folsom as the scene of a land annexation whose planned water supply "was semi-theoretical, a bunch of water wonks arguing about that." The city's main water source, Folsom Lake, this winter left so much of its lake bed exposed that tourists wandered the temporary mudflats admiring ruins from the Gold Rush: http://bit.ly/1fGZD82. Folsom's South of Highway 50 annexation covers land in which developer Angelo Tsakopoulos was a major initial investor. The 2010 UWMP predicted this "Folsom Plan Area" (FPA) would gain population from zero in 2010 to 24,335 in 2035. Water supply was important in local controversy over the annexation, including a contentious 2004 election season. That year voters approved developer-sponsored Measure W, which allowed the annexation if existing residents' water rights and rates were protected. The FPA passed its SB 610 review around 2009. Folsom then planned to serve the new area by purchasing water rights from the Natomas Central Mutual Water Co.: http://bit.ly/PVtnTL; http://bit.ly/1gEsh3F. The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) approved the annexation in January 2012. Later in 2012, plans for the FPA's water supply shifted. City spokeswoman Sue Ryan responded to questions about that by sending the first 100 pages of a staff report supporting two approval resolutions that the City Council passed in December 11, 2012. (The report is downloadable from Item 8a on the 12/11/12 agenda at http://www.folsom.ca.us/agendas/.) The resolutions agreed that instead of using the Natomas water rights purchase to bring water from the Sacramento River (which had run into "uncertainties" about Bureau of Reclamation approval), an existing water entitlement would be transferred south from the East Area and supplemented with water saved through conservation while the developers paid for new infrastructure. The East Area's demand would be met with conservation savings and, if necessary, water purchases based on "a Sacramento County Water Agency contract with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, known as the Fazio Water Supply." As of summer 2013 the Sacramento Bee reported the developers would spend some $52 million to move and treat water for new properties out of the city's existing supply: http://bit.ly/1ggUvaD. There was an indignant discussion about that on the Tomatopages community site at http://bit.ly/1hK52I3, especially asking if the transfer of water rights infringed Measure W, but that's where the matter appears to have rested. Marcus Yasutake, who became Folsom's environmental and water resources director in summer 2013, described the year's drought, not as an all-out disaster, but as a data point and opportunity to teach conservation habits. In an interview that did not address technicalities or politics, he said the city was not in a situation to suspend new permits or connections. "Doesn't mean we won't ever be." He said, "I'm sure at some point in time 2013 will be included as a drought year from a planning perspective because we haven't gone through anything like 2013". He said "typically people look to the '76-'77 years," which at the time were "the worst on record, and now we have something that was even below that. So, the requires us to look at those drought type of years and to identify reduction or other supply alternatives." He said conservation measures under the 2010 UWMP included finding and patching leaks -- locally difficult because water easily seeps through cobbles left by Gold Rush dredging -- and an end to unmetered flat-rate water supply. Residential water meters began use in January 2013. Asked if there were any concerns about the water promises made in the annexation approval process being kept, Yasutake said it would take a drought years worse than the current one to trouble the water supply to the annexed area. Paso Robles Though facing a groundwater shortage and currently banning new wells, Paso Robles is not stopping two proposed annexations and a request for a General Plan change to allow further buildout. Planning Manager Susan DeCarli said recently begun construction will give the city better access to purchased water from Lake Nacimiento and the city also has had conservation successes, in part by replacing flat-rate billing with graduated rates. She said, "We have enough water capacity to withstand our full development buildout," which calls for population expansion from 30,000 to 45,000. "So as new developments are proposed, it's confusing to people," she said, because there are heavy restrictions on use of groundwater at the same time. The grandest proposed expansion, the Paso Robles Gateway development, calls for three hotels, houses and vineyards. DeCarli said given the "heightened sensitivity to water resources" the developers voluntarily agreed to do a Water Supply Assessment -- "they didn't argue" -- and planned to buy their own Lake Nacimiento water. "It's going to be a major issue when they go to LAFCo", she said. Did better planning help in such arrangements? she said it did help to direct new development to urbanized areas. "You can manage urban water to make sure you've got services."

With $1.54 billion already spent on California carbon emission rights, debate continues on whether the state's cap-and-trade auction process is valid and what the auction proceeds are for. The Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) has repeatedly questioned Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed uses for an expected $850 million in annual revenue from cap-and-trade auctions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission allowances. While Brown's proposals do support projects related to air quality, LAO has asked if they will achieve the best GHG reductions available for the money. LAO lays out and critiques Brown's proposals in a February 24 report at http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Detail/2953. It urges the Legislature to have the Air Resources Board set standards for state departments to use in deciding what programs would reduce GHGs most effectively. Of interest to local planners is that, per the February 24 report, Governor Brown's proposals would include $100 million in each of the next two fiscal years to support transit-oriented development programs related to SB 375 compliance, to be administered by the Strategic Growth Council, including possibly for grants to local governments' projects. These funds would replace the funds previously provided by Proposition 84, which will run out after this year. The LAO has been chivvying Brown on his proposed uses cap-and-trade proceeds since January, especially on his proposal to spend up to one-third of each year's proceeds on high-speed rail construction. LAO's January 13 report on the budget proposal at http://lao.ca.gov/reports/2014/budget/overview/budget-overview-2014.aspx called the use for high-speed rail "legally risky". As the Sacramento Bee noted at http://bit.ly/1cvGNuc, the Feb. 24 LAO report said high-speed rail construction "would actually generate GHG emissions of 30,000 metric tons over the next several years." Similar objections appear in a March 6 transportation report at http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Detail/2966. Brown's proposals have drawn mixed reviews from others too, as discussed in StreetsblogLA at http://bit.ly/1gGYkA8 and the LA Times at http://lat.ms/1g9dJyA. Per the LAO, the Governor's budget proposal would divide cap-and-trade money among 23 program components run by 11 departments and boards. The High-Speed Rail Authority would get $250 million in the coming fiscal year, and then 33% of all cap-and-trade revenue from 2015-2016 on. The Air Resources Board would get funding to administer the cap-and-trade program itself plus $200 million in each of the next two years for clean transportation. As noted, there would be the $100 million in each of two years for the SB 375 programs. Other recipients would include low-income weatherization, upgrades to Caltrans and state buildings, waste emission reduction and recycling, water conservation, State Water Project generator efficiency, wildfire prevention and watershed restoration. Out of $500 million borrowed from past cap-and-trade income by the General Fund, the budget would pay back $100 million in the coming year. The report suggested these activities might not reduce GHGs optimally, or if they did, it might be through "activities that would have happened on the natural (meaning without the support of cap-and-trade auction revenues)." Instead, it urged using cap-and-trade income for ending the separate $40 million "Cost of Implementation" charge to polluters or funding energy storage efficiency, carbon sequestration or alternative fuels. The State Senate's Standing Committee on Budget and Fiscal Review discussed the Governor's proposals for the revenue February 13. Materials are at http://bit.ly/1f0KfxV. On March 19 the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Resources and Transportation heard testimony on the Governor's proposals for the revenue. The Sacramento Bee's Dan Morain wrote up the appearance at this second hearing of "45 smart lobbyists and consultants" who each had ideas about how to spend the money. http://bit.ly/1gkVBRv. Steinberg's carbon tax proposal: rhetoric or literal legislation? State Senate president pro tem Darrell Steinberg has commented on Brown's proposals indirectly with a carbon tax proposal that, as the Mercury News commented at http://bit.ly/1dcbPx2, may be more rhetorical than legislative. Saying, "My attempt here is to stoke a debate," Steinberg proposed replacing the transportation fuels portion of the cap-and-trade system, which is expected to raise the cost of gas in 2015, with a carbon tax starting around 15 cents per gallon of fuel, rising in future years. His proposal would transfer most of the proceeds to households with incomes below $75,000 through a state earned-income tax credit, and would spend the rest on transit. Steinberg's initial statements on the tax are at http://bit.ly/1gEfKSl. The LA Times has more at http://lat.ms/1kZHUYG and http://lat.ms/1l1JGeD. Steinberg introduced a vaguely phrased version of the proposal as SB 1156: see http://bit.ly/1gMpJ4b. Auctions continue alongside litigation to stop them As of the most recent auction in February, which sold nearly $330 million in carbon permits, the Sacramento Bee reports at http://bit.ly/1hQg8Lz that California companies have spent $1.54 billion on greenhouse gas emission rights so far. The ongoing ARB auction page is at http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/capandtrade/auction/auction.htm. However, the legality of the auctions themselves is still at issue. Chamber of Commerce official Loren Kaye noted in a blog post at http://bit.ly/1jiR68Z that notices of appeal are on file in California Chamber of Commerce v. California Air Resources Board, a Sacramento Superior Court case that upheld the existing auction system last year. The decision and pleadings are at https://services.saccourt.ca.gov/publicdms/Search.aspx under case number 34-2012-80001313.

Officials of Healdsburg and at least three smaller water districts have been trying to shed unwanted status as poster children for the California drought. In a January 28 press release at http://www.cdph.ca.gov/Pages/NR14-012.aspx, the Department of Public Health issued a list of 17 communities that it said were at risk for running out of drinking water. Since then, Healdsburg City Manager Marjie Pettus has been insisting she doesn't know why. Pettus said, "We believe that perhaps an assumption was made because our City Council took proactive measures and implemented a mandatory water conservation measure." But she and Planning Director Barbara Nelson said the early move to strict conservation was a stewardship measure, not a sign of immediate shortage. city of healdsburg was on the initial list of 17 water systems identified as at risk with drought-related water supply concerns... based on our initial survey. since that time, some systems, such as healdsburg, have been able to improve their situation, some with cdph assistance, and the concerns have reduced."> city of healdsburg was on the initial list of 17 water systems identified as at risk with drought-related water supply concerns... based on our initial survey. since that time, some systems, such as healdsburg, have been able to improve their situation, some with cdph assistance, and the concerns have reduced."> Healdsburg is at Stage 2 mandatory water conservation, which calls for a 20% reduction below last year's water use. The city's Web site cites low Russian River flows from Lake Mendocino in imposing the restrictions: http://www.ci.healdsburg.ca.us/index.aspx?page=397. But Pettus said: "Healdsburg has sufficient water to meet current demand." She said the city can additionally draw from wells in Dry Creek Valley as of April 1 of each year. "Between the river and the wells we can meet all of our commercial and residential water needs." This chic wine-tourism destination with more than 11,000 residents was the largest water district on February's at-risk list. It appeared alongside smaller areas whose reactions have been mixed. Water managers in Shaver Lake Heights, Bass Lake and Sierra Cedars wrote that they were placed on the "at-risk" list in error and were then removed. Pete Conrad of Sierra Cedars passed on an email from CDPH's Merced District saying Sierra Cedars "should not have been included on the list as there is no indication that the system is experiencing any reduced capacity or other complications due to drought conditions." Pettus, however, said phone calls to state officials by Healdsburg Mayor Jim Wood got no clear explanation for the at-risk designation. She said, "They might have acknowledged the mistake but there was no corrective action taken." Some of the districts on the list of 17 do face nervous water situations. One such is Lake of the Woods, nearly a mile above sea level in the Tejon Pass area of Kern County. The New York Times' Adam Nagourney reported March 7 at http://nyti.ms/1g76cj1 that the community was near the point of trucking in water. In Redwood Valley, water manager Bill Koehler didn't mind being on the list. "Yes, we are, and yes, we deserve to be." He said tree-ring records suggested his area of Sonoma County, served by drastically low Lake Mendocino -- "It's a mudflat" -- was suffering a 400-year drought. He said Redwood Valley had about 120 days of water and then would have to depend on neighbors. The at-risk designation had no formal effect but Pettus said it drew "a tremendous amount of media attention". The 17 listed communities have been mentioned as emblematic of California's drought in news reports as far away as Toronto: http://bit.ly/1bK8n6m. Likewise Nagourney, reporting on Lake of the Woods, narrated, "for 17 small rural communities in California, the absence of rain is posing a fundamental threat to the most basic of services: drinking water..." At CDPH, spokesman Ron Owens responded to a request for comment by calling attention to a new list posted March 4: http://bit.ly/1g76RRq. The new list says "CDPH has prioritized assistance to the following public drinking water systems," and names seven districts: Willits, Redwood Valley, Lake of the Woods, and four remote districts that each serve 100 or fewer people. CDPH had not responded specifically by press time to a request for comment on the objections from Healdsburg and the three smaller towns, nor to a question how the criteria compared for the January 28 and the March 4 lists.

In a pair of decisions March 5, the Sacramento County Superior Court's Judge Timothy Frawley invalidated parts of the EIR that has been allowing the Kern Water Bank, a major groundwater reserve near Bakersfield, to function under its current legal framework. The water bank's physical operations and environmental safeguards were at issue, against a background that includes conservationists' criticism of influence in the bank's governance by entities associated with food and farming investor Stewart Resnick. The March 5 decisions in two companion cases rejected several wide-ranging objections to the EIR by the plaintiffs, who were conservationists and neighboring water districts. However, it found the EIR "fails to adequately describe, analyze, and (as appropriate) mitigate the potential impacts of the Project associated with the anticipated use and operation of the Kern Water Bank." The decision in the Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District v. Dept. of Water Resources case, which was the more focused on neighboring districts, added, "...particularly as to potential groundwater and water quality impacts." The two rulings dig deep into the fiercely arcane water-and-muscle history of the "Monterey Plus Project," created by the 2003 initial settlement of disputes over the 1994 Monterey Agreement between the State Water Project and its contractors on Southern California water distribution. The California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), among the successful plaintiffs, posted the decisions at https://www.c-win.org/press-room-monterey-plus-amendments.html. The pleadings and decisions are at https://services.saccourt.ca.gov/publicdms/ under case numbers 34-2010-80000561 and  34-2010-80000703. The LA Times' Bettina Boxall had initial reactions and analysis at http://lat.ms/1fK3YXu. Reached soon after the decision, Carolee Krieger, president of C-WIN, sounded thrilled and a little stunned. She said it addressed kinds of questions she had been asking since 1995, when as an amateur local activist she happened into a meeting in Buellton and heard for the first time about the Monterey Agreement. Although the current EIR "surfaced" in 2010, she said "it took this long for the judge to finally get to the merits of the case" -- and his ruling was for C-WIN's side. "It's just huge." She knew it wasn't over. She predicted the matter would be appealed and end up before the state Supreme Court. But she said, "You have no idea how happy I was because that's not what I expected. I expected to have to go to the Supreme Court to get a decision like this." Krieger said additional issues included the "urban preference" -- the question of whether the Monterey Amendments mean the water bank's most essential function is no longer the one originally intended for it: to backstop the State Water Project's supplies to city water systems. More narrowly, she said the decision indirectly affects water supply for large planned developments on the lands of the massive old Tejon and Newhall Ranches. However, Krieger and attorney Adam Keats, who litigated the case for the Center for Biological Diversity, did not comment more specifically about impact on residential development. Bakersfield Californian columnist Lois Henry, however, suggested in a recent news analysis that the decision might affect Tejon Mountain Village, as its EIR "specifically names water banked in the Kern Water Bank" as a source for its planned residential and business customers. She wrote, "If that water is caught up in some kind of freeze or injunction, what then?" Asked about consequences of the decision, Keats wrote: "It will all depend on what the court orders in terms of remedies. At this point everything is presumably on the table, from shutting the Kern Water Bank down pending environmental review to business as usual. So it's hard to say right now what effect this will have on any projects being planned or being built. That said, any project seeking to rely on the Kern Water Bank for its water supply should be questioning that supply. But I'm not aware of any such project at this moment." Attorneys representing Resnick's Roll International Corporation, Paramount Farming Company, LLC and related entities did not comment, except that a Roll Law Group attorney wrote, "please refer all inquiries to the Kern Water Bank Authority." At the water bank, director Jonathan Parker responded by email: "The KWBA is disappointed.  We are reviewing the decisions and our options. In any event, moving forward we will comply with CEQA." As of March 12 he wrote that the upcoming timeline was "Uncertain. There may be a remedies hearing later summer or early fall." (The court has since scheduled such a hearing for September 5.) He wrote that he was not familiar with the residential projects. Ellen Hanak of the Public Policy Institute of California said, "I'm a little perplexed by the decision." She said the groundwater bank under its current management was among leaders in Kern County, who others have emulated, enabling active storage of groundwater and making the system more resilient. Hence she said, "I don't understand the argument" that the current operation could worsen care for the water supply.

SGC has announced its timeline for applications for the 2015-16 Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program and has scheduled six statewide workshops.The schedule for the AHSC program is as follows:  Release of Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA): Friday, January 29, 2016 Concept Applications Due: Wednesday, March 16, 2016 Notification of Invite to Submit Full Application: Week of April 20, 2016 Full Applications Due: Monday, June 20, 2016 Awards Announced: September 2016 The workshop schedule is as follows:  Fresno: Tuesday, February 2 Sacramento: Wednesday, February 3 Oakland: Thursday, February 4 Riverside: Monday, February 8 Los Angeles: Tuesday, February 9 San Diego: Wednesday, February 10 The workshops will include a presentation regarding the AHSC Program Guidelines and requirements for Concept Application, with a question and answer session after the presentation.  Staff will be available on the afternoon of each workshop for small group or one-on-one consultations on a first come, first served basis. The consultations will be 20 minutes in length and will be used to focus on projects that are ready to apply for the 2015-2016 AHSC Program, discuss project eligibility, and answer questions specific to the applicant's project. For consultation times, AHSC Program Staff will follow-up to confirm the exact time of the appointment. Applicants with projects in or benefitting Disadvantaged Communities (as defined by CalEnviroscreen 2.0) will be given priority for consultations. However, our goal is to provide consultations to all who request an appointment. Further workshop information and signup is available here (pdf).  See CP&DR coverage of 2015 AHSC awards.

Now that comprehensive legislative reform of the California Environmental Quality Act seems unlikely, all eyes are turning to the California Supreme Court - if not for reform, then at least for clarity that will make the world of CEQA a little simpler, a little cleaner, and a little more understandable. Good luck. Although the Cal Supremes have a heavy CEQA docket - and the justices are clearly putting a lot of thought into CEQA cases - the result is not exactly clarity. When the Berkeley Hillside case went before the Cal Supremes, everybody hoped the result would be clarity about when the unusual circumstances exemption can be used. But the result was a complicated two-step test that actually may strengthen the exemption but requires a lot more effort to do so. And when the most recent Newhall Ranch case  went up to the court, everybody hoped there would be clarity about how practitioners might approach the question of what percentage reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would be an acceptable target in CEQA analysis. In that case, the justices was pretty clear about what wouldn't be acceptable - simply using the Air Resources Board's regional number - but they weren't very clear about what methodology should be used.  What's going on? Shouldn't we be able to count on the California Supreme Court to provide clear lines? CEQA is an unusually complicated, mostly procedural law that is deliberately designed to be enforced through litigation. It's so ubiquitous and complicated that every county's superior court has a designated CEQA judge. Since its passage 45 years ago, it has evolved far more through court rulings than legislation. And that's not likely to change soon. Despite a lot of rumblings about comprehensive CEQA reform in recent years, the moment appears to have passed . Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is working through a big backlog of CEQA cases . But there a couple of other things going on here. First, CEQA litigation issues are getting ever more complicated and arcane. When I first started writing about CEQA lawsuits back in the -80s, the issues seemed, in retrospect, pretty clear-cut: Who had standing? Was an environmental impact report required? What level of independent judgment did a lead agency have to apply if the draft EIR was done by the applicant? And, later, were specific mitigations feasible or not. Yes, there were often legal debates about adequacy of the analysis, but there was also a lot of deference given to lead agencies. Compare those kinds of questions to the issue that came up in Berkeley Hillside : Did the City of Berkeley put enough evidence on the record that a very large proposed house was not unusual within the context of the city, and therefore the city's use of two categorical exemptions was not overridden by the "unusual circumstances" rule contained in the CEQA Guidelines. That is a long, long way from, "Do you have to do an EIR"? But there's another factor at work here, as veteran CEQA attorney Tina Thomas pointed out at last week's 30th annual UCLA Land Use Law and Planning Conference last week. It's the way the California Supreme Court works these days. Since he re-election as governor in 2010, Jerry Brown has reshaped the court to some extent, appointing three of the seven justices: Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, Stanford law professor Mariano-Florentino Cu-llar; and former deputy attorney general Leondra Kruger. Unlike a lot of Brown's selections back in the -70s, they're all solid choices. Along with Wilson and Schwarzenegger holdovers - including Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye - they represent a lot of intellectual horsepower. And, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, they apparently work hard to reach consensus and avoid a lot of concurring and dissenting opinions.  Which, apparently, is the problem. "The justices go to great length to avoid scathing dissent," Thomas told the crowd of 300 people at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. "So they go out of their way to compromise. The result is sometimes complicated, nuanced ways of spiltting standards of review that are difficult for lower court to apply. You may want clear answers, you may not get them." This problem became immediately apparent after the Berkeley Hillside ruling, when the Third District considered the case of a rodeo fundraiser at the Santa Cruz Fairgrounds in Watsonville . The Supreme Court had concluded the lead agency must first review the record to see whether unusual circumstances exist and if so courts must use the "substantial evidence" test in determining the validity of an exemption under those circumstances. The court ruled that a categorical exemption can be defeated by a "fair argument" that supports a reasonable possibility that significant environmental effects will result from the "unusual circumstances." But it also held that "a party may establish an unusual circumstance with evidence that the project will have a significant environmental effect."  In the Santa Cruz rodeo case, the Third District said the environmentalist plaintiffs didn't meet either test. The plaintiffs are appealing the case but the Supreme Court hasn't decided yet whether to take it. Kevin Bundy of the Center for Biological Diversity, another panelist at the UCLA event, said he feared that the Supreme Court's ruling would lead others to conclude that merely qualifying for an exemption would be substantial evidence that unusual circumstances don't exist. "That reads unusual circumstances out of the law," he said.  In some ways the latest Newhall Ranch case is even more confusing, because the court rejected the idea that Los Angeles County could use the Air Resource Board's regional estimate for required greenhouse gas emissions reduction (29% by 2030) as the standard against which to measure an individual project. But does this mean less deference to lead agencies? "Courts need to look carefully at the record to make sure that the record really connects the dot," said Bundy, the winning lawyer in the case. "The record needed to show the quantitative link between those two assumptions and it did not." But Thomas, who was the losing lawyer in the case, had a different view. "In my personal opinion, I've always understood the standard to be, good faith effort for full disclosure," she said, "and I didn't understand it to be mathematical precision." In a way, the disagreement between Thomas and Bundy may simply be a traditional disagreement between an agency lawyer who wants the courts to give deference to the agency and an environmental lawyer who wants the courts to push agencies harder for environmental protection. Or it may be a generational thing. Thomas, like me, came to CEQA maturity in the -80s, while Bundy passed the bar 25 years later.  But it reinforced one thing for me: It's not just that CEQA never going to get any simpler. (We crossed that bridge a long time ago ). It's probably not going to get any clearer, either.

With the economy humming along, innovative ideas sprouting up around the state, and, of course, the occasional dispute, 2015 was as lively a year for land use as any other in recent memory. To mark the new year, CP&DR presents its most-read stories of 2015. Four of these ten articles, including the top two, center on housing. It is the slow-motion crisis that encompasses literally every element of urban planning, from economics to demographics to policy and does so at every level of government from the largest metro areas to the smallest hamlets across California. Innovation also caught CP&DR readers' attention, with coverage of the tech economy, progressive legislation, and one of the great urban innovators of our state and our time: Prof. Don Shoup. CEQA gets in a few words edgewise. Tellingly, an article on Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts from 2014 made 2015's most-read list, revealing a continuing thirst for, an uncertainty about, the next generation of redevelopment policy. Here are the top ten, in order of popularity: Los Angeles' Slow-Growthers Have Gotten What They Wanted 6 April 2015 "Constrained supply and ever increasing demand equals  insane housing prices . In a typical industry, supply would never become this constrained. Firms would produce more, or consumers would seek substitutes. Equilibrium would be restored. But this is real estate, and those rules don't apply." Does Supply Create Its Own Demand? 27 July 2015 "Under some market conditions, more supply doesn't lead to market equilibrium because it actually creates its own demand. You can see this wherever the world's uber-rich decide to buy houses � New York, London, or, most relevant to this discussion, Santa Barbara." The Man Who Changed the Way We Think About Parking 19 April 2015 "Don Shoup has accomplished something every academic hopes to achieve and almost no one ever does: He has completely reframed an important public policy issue so that everybody thinks about it differently." Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts Legislation Passes in SB 628 31 August 2014 "The mechanism would be simpler, more focused on infrastructure, and more dependent on electoral approval, without the flexibility or protections for the existing urban public that were built and bashed into Redevelopment over the years." CEQA: The Cause of All Problems in California 23 March 2015 "Somehow, among all the laws, regulations, micro-, macro-, and global economic trends that impact on and emanate from our state, the overriding cause of California's malaise is � wait for it � CEQA." Is This The Right Meeting? Really? 2 December 2015 "Any greenhorn planner in the most podunk jurisdiction knows that he needs to keep a few audience-management tricks up his sleeve." Bill to Delay Implementation of SB 743 Gains Traction 25 May 2015 "A developers' group is promoting a new piece of legislation that would postpone implementation of SB 743 � the bill that would change traffic analysis to vehicle miles traveled in environmental review � for a year. The bill has apparently revealed a split among developers who say they focus on infill projects." Fair Housing: Talking Past Each Other About Cities and Segregation 30 August 2015 "On July 8 the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued  its final rule  on "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing." Under the rule, state and local agencies receiving HUD funds must now do more than passively study barriers to fair housing: they must also make and follow genuine plans to reduce the barriers they describe." The Tech Housing Crunch's Fracking Dilemma 27 November 2015 "The dilemma of the tech housing crunch: If you build more housing for tech workers, won't those same tech workers just create new apps to disrupt the balance once again � to the benefit of well-off folks, at the expense of everybody else, including most of the tech workers? It's a little like the Gold Rush, when hydraulic mining was all the rage." California Cities and the Innovation Economy: Q&A With Enrico Moretti 6 April 2015 "Enrico Moretti, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, explains how cities promote innovation (defined not just as technology, but also as medicine, media, manufacturing and other sections that rely on constant improvement of products and services) and, importantly, how innovation affects cities' economies."

Boundless as cyberspace may be, the companies that rule the internet still have to take up real estate. And their employees still have to put their heads down somewhere at night. For whatever reason, the mysterious forces of the " innovation economy " have lured an outside share of those companies, and their employees, to Silicon Valley.  With all those likes, stock options, and organic cafeteria items comes, of course, a housing crisis. As absolutely no one is unaware, rents in Silicon Valley have gone up like Pets.com stock over the past few years.  Last week Facebook announced that it was going to make an investment in the crisis. Not an investment in housing, mind you. Just an investment in the crisis. Facebook is reportedly offering $10,000 to workers who relocate within a 10-mile radius of its Menlo Park headquarters. On face, there's something admirably civic-minded about this. For one, Facebook wants employees to reduce their commute times and, by extension, their emissions. That's something that pretty much every city in California is trying to do, (minus the $10,000 bonus). Let's put that in the 'like' column.  Let's, though, look at the real winners and losers from a policy like this:  Winner #1: Facebook Employees As long as the cost of relocation, including rent increases, is less than the $10,000 that the company is offering, then employees win with shorter commutes, lower transportation costs, and the charms of Foster City, Newark, and, if you're lucky, Woodside. Then again, if you live in Woodside, $10,000 probably doesn't even cover the cost of groundskeeping.  Winner #2: Facebook Let's do a little math. Facebook made $2.59 billion in revenue last year. It employs 12,000 people. Each employee represents $215,000 in annual revenue. If a $10,000 one-time payment keeps employees happy, loyal, and productive, then it's a bargain.  Winner #3: Landlords Several million people live within Facebook's magical 10-mile radius. The handful of Facebook employees who take advantage of this deal and decide to scootch in are hardly going to upset the valley rental market all by themselves. But there's something fundamentally perverse, and economically inefficient, about a wealthy company offering wealthy employees even more money so that they can cope with an insane housing market that the company helped create in the first place. Taken to its logical extension--whereby all Silicon Valley firms start offering these incentives � all rents will go higher and landlords will get richer. That's because it's a lot easier to print bonus checks than it is to build housing, especially if cities aren't encouraging it.  Neutral Parties: Cities If you're a city in the 10-mile radius, you don't care what Facebook does, because you don't collect more taxes when rents go up. Losers: Everyone Else If you're not a Facebook employee, you're livid, because you now have richer competition for rental units.  (Before we go any further, let's acknowledge the real losers here: cartographers. Clearly none of brilliant folks at Facebook has considered that drawing a circumference around a point is the worst possible way to prescribe a commute shed -- especially when the resulting circle is bisected by a body of water called the San Francisco Bay. A subtler map, assigning bonuses to employees who live along transit lines, or at least freeways and major roads, would have made a ton more sense. As it is, you could sail in from the Farallons more quickly than you can cross the Dunbarton Bridge on most mornings.) Tech firms too often seem blind to the civic problems that surround them, especially when it comes to housing. Companies in Silicon Valley and, more recently, in Los Angeles have built fortunes partly on the allure of their respective locations, but they've done little to support their host cities or even to lobby for policies that would benefit them and everyone else. Exhibit A, as I wrote in another publication, is the failure of Santa Monica's Silicon Beach crowd to even notice when the city was actively reducing its housing capacity.  At least Facebook is acknowledging the problem. But it's pursuing the wrong solution. Or, rather, it's pursuing a self-interested solution rather than a civic-minded solution. It kind of reminds you of those private buses that pick up Google employees. They've been a big hit.  These are companies that like instant solutions. If you want to build a widget these days, you don't need to spend months to design it, prototype it, and find a factory to produce it. You just whip up some code. if you want to address the biggest crisis in the country's biggest state, you write some checks. At some point, the laws of economics are going to catch up with today's high-flying tech firms. Stock prices are going to fall, and profit margins are going to even out. Maybe someday people will go back to old-fashioned socializing. The point is, companies like Facebook aren't gong to be able to throw money at their problems. They're going to have to acknowledge that they're connected to other entities, they're going to have to cooperate with their neighbors, corporate and otherwise, and they're going to have to reach agreements that serve the common good. They will, in short, discover what governance, policy, and democracy is all about. By that point, they may discover what most progressive planners already know: The way to solve a housing crisis is, amazingly, to build more housing. Build denser housing. Build housing near transit. Build housing near jobs. I don't think Facebook is entirely ignorant of this reality. In fact, I'm sure it has residential neighbors who are far more ignorant than the company ever is. But, so far, firms that consider a 3-by-5-inch screen to be their most valuable pieces of real estate have proven pretty ham-fisted when it comes to real real estate.  Maybe now is the time for tech firms to put innovation aside and learn the old-fashioned art of policymaking.

Th e California Environmental Quality Act does not apply in reverse, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday. Overturning the First District Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court ruled that, with a few exceptions, CEQA analysis must be limited to the project's impacts on the environment (and, by extension, the project's environmental impacts on its own population) but not  the environment's impact on the project. Among other things, the ruling would seem to suggest that a CEQA analysis cannot analyze and mitigate the effect of future sea level rise or other climate change effects on a proposed project.  e conclude that agencies subject to CEQA generally are not required to analyze the impact of existing environmental conditions on a project's future users or residents," wrote Justice  Mariano-Florentino Cuellar for the unanimous court. " But when a proposed project risks exacerbating those environmental hazards or conditions that already exist, an agency must analyze the potential impacts of such hazards on future residents or user. In those specific instances, it is the project's impact on the environment -- and not the environment's impact on the project -- that compels an evaluation of how future residents or users could be affected by exacerbated conditions.  Cuellar, a longtime Stanford law professor and expert on administrative law, was appointed to the court last January by Gov. Jerry Brown. The court carved out exceptions to the "No-CEQA-In-Reverse" rule for airport-related safety hazards and noise problems (Public Resources Code Section 21096), schools locatd in close proximity to hazards, waste, or freeways that might emit hazardous substances (Section 21151.8), and housing developments located close to hazardous substances and sites subject to wildland fire, seismic, landslide, or flood hazards (Section 21159 and Section 21155.) The case, California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District , can be found here . A fuller CP&DR writeup is pending.