Articles

A city is not liable for damages sustained because it failed to record a notice that a property was in a known landslide zone, despite a city ordinance requiring such recordation, the California Supreme Court has ruled. In a case watched closely by many California cities and counties, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that the City of Los Angeles was not liable when the 1994 Northridge earthquake caused a landslide that destroyed a house in Pacific Palisades. Justices did not dispute landowne...

A vesting tentative parcel map approved in 1990 but never recorded as a final parcel map had expired by the time a developer tried to act on the map in 1996, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The court held that under both the Subdivision Map Act and the Manhattan Beach Municipal Code, the map for a four-unit beachside condominium project was no longer valid. The unanimous three-judge panel also found that project opponents properly exhausted their administrative remedies even thou...

In a recently published opinion, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed construction of a high school in Tucson, Arizona, despite contentions from environmentalists that the school would harm an endangered owl. The case involved differing opinions by experts and the trial judge's exclusion of testimony by two experts called by environmentalists. The Ninth Circuit ruled that Federal District Judge Frank Zapata did not rule unreasonably, and the three-judge appellate panel upheld the dec...

Insurance companies might have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a notorious toxic waste dump in Riverside County, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled. In a complex ruling that combines state water law with liability insurance coverage definitions, the court ruled that the State of California "owns" all of the groundwater under the surface of the state, but not within the traditional definition of property ownership. Thus, the ownersh...

Among the hardest dictums for regulatory planners to swallow is this: possession is 90%. Nonetheless, it's a truism not lost upon a growing number of state conservancies, which have shown that acquisitions are among the best ways to safeguard California's natural resources and open spaces. And even though there has been grumbling about a perceived bias for funding of north state acquisitions over Southern California ones, recent history does not appear to support the complaint. The state's...

A new high school in Watsonville's coastal zone won the approval of the California Coastal Commission during the panel's March meeting. Also in this month's roundup of news: New Army Corps of Engineers wetlands regulations; Ahmanson Ranch battle continues; temporary logging rules adopted; Antioch says the commute is fine; federal property rights bill advances.

One of the most difficult parts of making environmental changes is bringing all the parties to the table. Sometimes it takes lawsuits, sometimes it takes political pressure. In the case of the Sacramento River in California's Central Valley, it has taken 13 years of meetings among environmentalists, government officials and farmers to gain consensus and cement ties for a group to coordinate a river restoration project along a huge portion of the 373-mile river. The best-known and most conte...

Everybody always complains about growth but nobody ever does anything about it. That, at least, is one way to view the March 7 election returns. According to most polls, sprawl tops many lists of community problems these days. But voters in almost a dozen California communities rejected the opportunity to use "ballot-box zoning" to stop growth and development. And it will be interesting to see whether that trend continues in the November election — when some very big anti-growth initiatives ar...

Everybody in San Diego seems amazed that developer Doug Manchester is willing to guarantee the city $50 million in tax revenues from his yet-to-be-built hotel. Even he seems amazed. "I challenge any reputable developer to step forward and say he or she would do the same deal," Manchester wrote in an Op-Ed piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune last October. At that time, he was offering to guarantee $5 million annually for two years, not the same amount for 10 years, as he would later agree to. ...

An 11-square-mile portion of the northeast San Fernando Valley could become the City of Los Angeles' largest redevelopment project area. Planners have been at work on the project for about three years, and the City Council is expected to decide whether to create the project area this summer. However, the area is so large — and suffers from such widespread decay — that some people wonder whether a redevelopment project can provide meaningful change. While other cities have giant redevelopment ...

A proposal to expand the San Diego Zoo has forced city officials, civic activists and the Zoological Society to reexamine the zoo and its relationship to Balboa Park, where the facility is located. San Diegans consider both the zoo and the park civic treasures, and finding a compatible mix is proving to be a time-consuming and politically sensitive project. Although the issues are complex, the questions are relatively simple — how large to make the zoo, and how to solve traffic congestion and p...

Alameda County Livermore: Voters overwhelmingly approved Measure K, a plan to modify the urban growth boundary to allow construction of 1,500 houses and preservation of some 2,000 acres of farmland and undeveloped property. Pleasanton: More than 63% of voters supported a $50 million bond issue to purchase land in the city which is owned by the City of San Francisco and slated for development. But that was not enough to win the two-thirds majority required for Measure I approval. Contra Costa

For the second time in less than a year, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled against Riverside County landowners whose property was foreclosed upon because of nonpayment of special taxes. The court ruled that taxes levied under the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Act (Government Code §53311) are special taxes, not special assessments, and that failure of the government to use Mello-Roos bond proceeds as promised does not excuse nonpayment of those special taxes. Late last year, i...

In one of its rare published opinions, the Fifth District Court of Appeal rebuked the City of Fresno and a developer for violating the California Environmental Quality Act. Specifically, the unanimous three-judge appellate panel rejected the argument that the court cannot require an environmental impact report because the disputed project was built during litigation. "The corporation apparently made a calculated business decision to go forward with the project in spite of protests by residential...