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For the second time this year, we've been reminded that the California Environmental Quality Act is not a set of tablets brought down from Mount Whitney. It's just a state law, and it can be changed whenever the Legislature and the governor can agree on changing it – especially during bad economic times.

The latest reminder is AB 81X3, signed by the governor the other day, which exempts the proposed football stadium in Industry from CEQA – and even from several pending CEQA lawsuits.  This law comes only a few months after the state budget deal, which truncated or eliminated CEQA review on several highway projects that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to get moving.

Ah, the growth wars. What would we land use journalists do if there were ever a truce?

My ire often rises when the national media or some big-time organization ignores California. Don't they know how important we on the whacky West Coast are?
 
When the American Planning Association released a list of the 10 best streets in the country and not a single California street was on it, my outrage cranked up. At first. Then I got to thinking: What is the best street in California? Should it be among the APA's top 10?
 

Choose your analogy.

CEQA is like pi: It goes on without end, for infinity.

CEQA is like a "Friday the 13th" movie: Horrifying yet predictable, and it keeps coming back.

CEQA is like the Bill of Rights: Ingenious and adaptable for any age.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was listening to yet another SB 375 panel at the California state planning conference, a text message popped up congratulating me for being named the 99th top urban thinker in a recent Planetizen poll.

There are consequences to every public policy choice we make. An editorial in today's Monterey County Herald makes the argument that one consequence of not providing enough decent, affordable housing for low-wage laborers is crime and violent death.

It's increasingly clear that land use planners are not quite sure what to do about climate change.

For the third consecutive year, the subject of climate change dominated the annual conference of the American Planning Association, California Chapter. What was evident during this year's event, which concluded September 16 in Squaw Valley, was that the issues are extraordinarily complex, and the available tools are not ideal. Planners, as well as engineers and attorneys, acknowledge they are "just making it up as they go." No one appears to feel comfortable about it.

The planners may have all gone home from Squaw Valley, but the planning talk has continued apace in San Jose, where the League of California Cities annual conference started on Wednesday. Most of the talk, not surprisingly, is about money – specifically, how Sacramento keeps taking it – but there's also plenty of policy talk, especially about affordable housing.

The recession's very personal impacts provide the real story at the APA California conference that concludes Wednesday in Squaw Valley.

Sure, we're all going to panels about climate change and LEED and CEQA and form-based zoning codes. But in between and after the panels about saving the world, the talk is about layoffs, unexpected career changes, firm mergers, doing more with less, and a lack of private sector work.

A lot of the talk here at the California APA Conference in Squaw Valley is about climate change – and, more specifically, about how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. But there's more and more talk – important but poorly attended – about the other side of the coin, which is dealing with sea level rise and other consequences of climate change.

It's always been a mystery to me why traffic modeling – and traffic mitigation – is such a big part of analysis done under the California Environmental Quality Act. After all, traffic in and of itself is not an environmental impact, any more than building a building is an environmental impact. Traffic may cause certain environmental impacts – air pollution, for example, depending on the fuels used – but there's nothing inherently damaging environmentally about traffic.

The executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency told the lunch crowd at the APA California conference today that her agency provides a model for regional planning. She was right – but not in the way she intended.