Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Monday that he has selected Vince Bertoni as the city's new planning director, replacing Michael Lo Grande. Bertoni is currently planning director of Pasadena and a former deputy director in Los Angeles. Bertoni must be confirmed by the L.A. City Council.

Local governments in the Inland Empire won one and lost one in rulings about medical marijuana, both from the same panel of justices on the Fourth District Court of Appeal.

All of sudden, or so it seems, a stadium mania has overtaken California. The dreams, schemes and honest-to-goodness plans for football and baseball stadiums are coming so fast that it’s difficult to keep track of them.

Ever since Gov. Jerry Brown killed redevelopment in 2011, the conventional wisdom has been that eventually he would give it a second life - but only after he was sure the old system was completely dead, in a way that protects the state general fund, and probably after he himself won re-election to a final term.

In the latest court ruling in one of California’s longest-running land-use disputes, an appellate court has upheld a judgment of almost $3 million against a Sebastapol landowner for breaching his contractor with a development company that has been attempting to develop the landowner’s 21 acres for almost 20 years. Both sides have accused the other of a variety of breaches over the years, all associated with getting permits for the property and its development.

Thirty years ago, in his first big majority opinion -- a land-use case from the California coast -- Antonin Scalia found the colorful and irreverent style that came to distinguish his career on the Supreme Court. And with one clean swipe, he knocked William Brennan out of the box and became the intellectual leader of the court.

What do touchdowns, trade shows, room service, rivers, and dorm rooms have in common? In San Diego, quite a bit.

The California Department of Food & Agriculture erred in preparing an environmental impact report for a program intended to eradicate with an invasive pest without examining the long-term consequences of an alternative program to control the pest rather than eradicate it, the Third District Court of Appeal has ruled.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on April 25 to take a case from Connecticut that would have overturned the 1985 case Williamson County Regional Planning Comm'n v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City , 473 U. S. 172, a pre-First English case in which the court ruled that property owners seeking to a regulatory taking case in federal court have to first ensure that all administrative remedies at the local or state level are exhausted and then seek compensation through whatever mechanism is provided by the state.

Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court wetlands ruling could have wide-ranging implications for landowners in California and elsewhere seeking federal wetlands permits – giving them a quicker way to get into court to challenge federal agencies’ judgment about what is a wetland and what isn’t.

As California’s housing affordability crisis has gone from bad to perilous since the end of the recession, the solution has generally relied on a combination of Regional Housing Needs Assessments and wishful thinking about market forces.

Almost in spite of itself, Los Angeles has emerged as a city focused on transit. The big question now is whether L.A. can move from being a city focused on transit to a transit-oriented city.