Blogs

By Morris Newman

TIPPER and AL GORE have retired for the evening. They lie supine under the covers and are wearing pajamas, each with their respective monograms on the chest pockets. 

Al: "Honey, something's been on my mind...."

Tipper: "If it's dirty, please write it down. You know I don't like to hear smutty language."

Al. (chuckling): "No, hon, nothing like that. Those fires are banked for the night. I'm just wondering if we blew enough insulation into this house."

Tipper (lecturing tone): "Albert, we have 300 cubic yards of insulation in this house. Plus we live in Tennessee, not Wasilla. It's never below 50 degrees."

AL: "I know, I know. It's just that this house is so… freakin' gi-normous. Sometimes I don't see you for days."

Tipper: "It's true. But, then again, it's not even the biggest on the block!" (coyly): "Did you miss me?"

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California, one size does not even come close to fitting all.

That's all I could conclude after the SB 375 Regional Targets Advisory Committee (RTAC) and metropolitan planning organization (MPO) representatives touched on an amazing array of policy and technical issues during an all-day meeting on Tuesday.

All right, I could also conclude that what has been a highly technical process may be on the verge of becoming very political.

(Please note that the word "draconian" does not occur once in the following post concerning the ongoing budget debacle. Readers susceptible to cliché-induced seizures (CIS) can read this article without ill effect.)

By his own characterization, the governor's latest proposal attempts to close the $19 billion shortfall in the coming year's budget almost entirely through cuts. For CP&DR readers, it's probably unnecessary to explain that many of these cuts affect – or have effectively eliminated – services for low-income people, not limited to affordable housing, health care and early childhood education. Hell, we can't even afford our prisons—an irony well deserved by the Lock-'em-Up State. 

The Regional Targets Advisory Committee returns to work next week for what promises to be a very technical meeting regarding greenhouse gas reduction forecasts.

The meeting and discussion are the next step in trying to answer this question: How is California going to grow in a way that reduces the amount that people drive?  

As you probably recall, the committee (known as the RTAC or "Are-Tack") was charged with making recommendations to the Air Resources Board for regional greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions from passenger vehicles, based on transportation systems and land use planning. The committee report issued last September was one of the first steps in implementing SB 375, the 2008 legislation that ties land use planning and transportation so as to reduce GHG emissions.

 President Obama has now nominated two women to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court – and the addition of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- nominated Monday and almost sure to be confirmed -- will definitely give the court a new tilt. But the tilt isn't about gender. It's about geography. In Sotomayor and Kagan, Obama has selected two women who have lived their whole lives in big cities – they're both from New York, though from very different backgrounds (Sotomayor's from the Bronx).

The ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico may be the best thing ever to happen to the renewable energy industry.

I hope that doesn't sound crass. Really, I'm not celebrating in any way a disaster that has already killed 11 oil platform workers and is threatening the livelihoods of countless people in the fishing and tourism industries.

But history teaches us that the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 was one of the galvanizing incidents of the environmental movement. That spill also was caused by the blowout of an offshore oil well. Three million gallons of crude oil spilled into Santa Barbara channel, coating miles of coastline and thousands of birds. You can almost draw a direct line from that event to the California Environmental Quality Act to the California Coastal Act. In fact, many of our cornerstone state and federal environmental laws stem from the early- and mid-1970s, when the environmental movement was ascendant.

It's possible to reduce greenhouse gas reductions in Southern California 7-9% per capita by 2020 with a mid-range growth scenario that "achievable and ambitious," Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, said Thursday.

In a long-awaited presentation to the SCAG General Assembly in La Quinta, Ikhrata said SCAG would convey the estimate to the California Air Resources Board, which is scheduled to provide SCAG and other regions with a per-capita GHG target in June under the terms of SB 375.

Ikhrata's presentation was clearly an effort to influence the ARB's draft target. Elected officials in the SCAG region and elsewhere have expressed concern that ARB will establish a target that is beyond the reach of communities to hit. "Before ARB gives us a target we want to tell them what we can do," Ikhrata said. 

The Legislative Analyst's Office released possibly the most obvious report in its history last week. The LAO said it's a bad idea to spend one-time revenues on ongoing expenses, and it's an even worse idea to generate those revenues by selling things you're going to need for many years.

The LAO concluded that the Schwarzenegger administration's plan to sell 11 state-owned office complexes to help balance the state budget was a "poor fiscal policy." The state would get a pile of money from the sale, but then it would have to spend more piles of money in future years to lease the office space from the new owners.

Yeah, no kidding. The idea is not akin to cleaning out the garage and selling a bunch of junk to pay the light bill. It's more like selling your dishes and flatware to pay for groceries. You'll have food, but you'll still need something with which to eat it.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Last year shopping mall giant Westfield floated a proposal for a 49-story tower in Century City, part of a master plan to reinvent one of the great prototypical edge cities.

One Yuba County developer whose subdivision project was defeated in a referendum should buy lunch for everyone who voted against him.

Is this the year that CEQA goes down in a flaming pile of EIRs and writs? The year when unwashed masses of tree huggers watch helplessly as greedy developers pave paradise to put up parking lots? Probably not, but there is no doubt the California Environmental Quality Act is under attack these days.

Legislation to weaken CEQA is pending in Sacramento, and a ballot measure that would prohibit citizen lawsuits based on CEQA has received clearance for signatures. The CEQA haters argue that the law is stifling California's economy. (You can swap "AB 32" or "SB 375" into that sentence if you want, but that's for another article.)

0-and-4. That's the Third District Court of Appeal's record in California Environmental Quality Act cases at the state Supreme Court since 2007.

Earlier this month, in Stockton Citizens for Responsible Planning v. City of Stockton (see CP&DR Legal Digest, March 15, 2010), the state Supreme Court unanimously reversed a Third District ruling regarding the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit that challenges a city's notice of exemption from CEQA review.

Say George Clooney went to Nobu last night and ran into Diddy in the valet line, where they discussed their mutual affinity for Kiton suiting. How do we know? Photographs, of course. Why do we care? Not sure, but USC Planning Professor Elizabeth Currid has taken a stab at it. 

What appeared last fall to be a major win for property rights advocates may have been a fleeting victory. Earlier this month, an en banc panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided to rehear a rent control case from the City of Goleta, meaning the earlier ruling in favor of the property owner is wiped out.