Articles

One year ago, a series of wildfires wrought an unprecedented level of destruction in Southern California, and many experts believe that fires of similar magnitude could strike again. In the year since the fires, government agencies have approved a variety of measures in hopes of reducing damage by future fires, but it does not appear that broad changes in land use planning are part of those fire-safe measures.

At first blush, the 108th Congress might not seem a welcoming venue for legislation expanding the nation's wilderness system. Majority control in both the House and Senate lies with Republican lawmakers whose attitude toward initiatives backed by environmentalists has ranged from indifference to hostility.

Any comparison between Cal Poly Pomona and a hermit crab is likely to be met with skepticism. It is absurd to suggest that a 1,050-acre university campus in Los Angeles County has anything in common with a crustacean scuttling across the ocean floor. Except for one thing, that is: Both the university and the deep-sea creature want to set up housekeeping in structures left behind by others.

Stockton's inland shipping port is poised to triple its capacity if port officials can stave off a lawsuit filed by environmentalists and port neighbors. At issue is a plan to enlarge the port by 1,400 acres of land on the San Joaquin River that the Stockton Port District acquired from the federal government three years ago.

Oakland might be famous for having "no there there," but maybe no place is more sorely lacking a "there" than the San Fernando Valley. A team of architects and other professionals who are working with business boosters, however, hope to give the San Fernando Valley the city center it has never had.

Measures that would impose sales taxes for transportation dominate local ballots around California this November. Five counties are attempting to get voter approval for local-option sales taxes for the first time, while another five counties are seeking extensions of existing taxes. The elections demonstrate the growing growing importance of local, general taxes for funding transportation projects. However, the two-thirds vote requirement makes the revenue source far from certain.

A bill that would have required cities and counties to prepare economic impact reports for proposed big box stores that sell groceries received a veto from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. During a flurry of activity in September, the governor also rejected a bill that would have created a pilot brownfield cleanup program and a measure making minor amendments to the California Environmental Quality Act. Schwarzenegger signed two other brownfield bills, and measures endorsed by environmentalists.

Kern County is moving forward on a new application process for nearly 30 new dairies and 214,000 cows. Although dairy supporters argue that the dairies would be good for the local economy, the cows bring with them tons of worry over public health, air quality, ground and surface water quality, and quality of life.

Ten counties have ten different ideas about what to do with revenue from a local-option sales tax. Here are the details.

A complex deal that would prevent large-scale development of the Hearst Ranch on California's central coast is nearly complete. But the deal that will preserve the 82,000-acre ranch does not satisfy many members of an environmental community that has fought Hearst Ranch development plans for decades. While environmental groups dislike the deal, there is wide support for it among ranchers, farmland advocates, area residents, and San Luis Obispo County officials and business leaders.

Fifteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake caused a portion of the Bay Bridge to collapse, no one knows for sure when a seismically safe replacement will be built or how to pay for the job.

In an imagined conversion, two security spies consider the design of Dos Lagos, a new project in the City of Corona.

The 2003-04 legislative session has closed with the passage of dozens of mostly minor land use bills, and the failure of dozens of others. Still, lawmakers did pass a bipartisan measure creating a new Sierra Nevada Conservancy, and they continued to hammer on local governments about affordable housing development.

Fighting over water is a popular sport in the West, where generations of lawyers have refined the practice until it approaches an art. Often, the quantities at stake are prodigious, the output of entire watersheds. In other instances, however, the volume is so minuscule as to leave outsiders puzzled by all the fuss. A dispute of the latter sort is threatening to break out in Ventura County, where a broad coalition has united behind one of the largest dam-removal projects in American history.