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State lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills just before the February 22 deadline, and many of them concern land use.

At the time of the Legislature's deadline, we were putting together our big overview of land use legislation, so we were not able to look at every last bill. The late introductions don't change the fact that SB 375 (Steinberg) is the most important piece of land use legislation currently circulating. But we want to make sure you know about all the important and just plain weird land use bills.

If you live in the Bay Area, where everybody thinks they are the coolest people on earth, or in Los Angeles, the world's biggest experiment in infill development, it's hard to swallow the idea that Sacramento may be ahead of us on planning. But it's true.

Unlikely as it may the seem, Sacramento Area Council of Governments – the six-county regional planning agency commonly known as SACOG – has actually made the idea of higher-density projects conforming to the regional plan seem cool, even to suburban politicians.

Alaska's "bridge to nowhere" would really be a bridge to sprawl - and that's why it'll be a crucial issue in the upcoming Senate re-election campaign of 84-year-old Ted Stevens.

The Newhall Ranch project has acquired a substantial new foe: The City of Los Angeles. And not a moment too soon for longtime project opponents.

Newhall Ranch, of course, is a 21,000-unit, 12,000-acre project west of Santa Clarita that has been "in the planning stages" since the mid-1990s. In fact, the second story I ever wrote for CP&DR was about Newhall Ranch water supply issues (see CP&DR, January 1999).

Earlier this month, I was in our nation's capital, which served as the stage for the most recent federal theatrics on the issue of climate change regulation. The seventh annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference, sponsored by the Local Government Commission (an organization of locally-elected officials, city and county staff, planners, architects, and community leaders), took place in the hotel neighboring the site of the Conservative Political Action Conference. While we attended sessions such as "Where is the Money?

California's Central Valley is a distinctive place. It is a place of flat ground and extreme weather. It is a place of fruits, nuts, grains and dairy products, yet it's also a place of extensive suburban sprawl. It's a place with some of the worst air pollution in the country, but, when the sky is clear, a place with stunning mountain views. It's a place of recent immigrants and extreme poverty, and of fourth and fifth generation landowners.

California state officials aren't even dancing around the issue any more. They're openly admitting that the state can't possibly meet the greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals contained in AB 32 without a statewide strategy to reduce driving.

How do you implement smart growth successfully? Take one bite of the apple at a time.

That was the advice from local smart growth leaders in Nashville and Baton Rouge at a panel on implementing smart growth at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Washington, D.C., Friday.

A statewide cap on driving?

Here's the thing nobody is quite willing to say out loud about implementing California's climate change law in the land use arena: The state may have to place an overall cap on vehicle miles traveled (VMT), even as it must accommodate more growth.

Can "the Desert" handle a million people?

More to the point, can the Palm Springs/Coachella Valley region handle a million people without creating a huge mismatch in jobs and housing that will create a swell of outcommuting from the area into the more job-rich parts of Southern California.

Sacramento may be flooded with red ink these days – after all, the state's grappling with a $14 billion budget deficit – but that's not the only immersion the locals are talking about. As the feds get tougher about flood hazards, should the city go back to living on stilts, as it did in the old days?

In almost shockingly candid interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger concedes that his earlier answers for solving the state's budget and governance problems were based on his poor understanding of the problems and the system.

You might recall the 2003 recall campaign, when Schwarzenegger said he could solve the state's budget problems simply by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse." He now says these things are not a factor in the state's projected $14.5 billion budget deficit.