After a variety of setbacks, Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, is doggedly moving forward with bills to reform the California Environmental Quality Act and revive redevelopment. Both bills – SB 731 for CEQA and SB 1 for redevelopment – have cleared the Senate and are now pending in the Senate. The CEQA bill is more likely to be enacted into law. Steinberg deliberately created a consensus bill with little opposition  and it passed the Senate 39-0. The redevelopment bill – a rerun of last year's SB 1156, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown – passed the Senate 27-11 on a party-line vote and Brown may well veto it again. Perhaps the biggest CEQA change called for in SB 731 is the creation of state significance thresholds for parking, transportation, and noise. The bill would allow local governments to create stricter standards – but one can imagine quick a battle at the Natural Resources Agency and the Office of Planning & Research over whether the state thresholds should be strong or weak. In addition, the bill would ditch aesthetics as a CEQA issue.  Steinberg's bill originally called for an appropriation of $30 million per year to fund planning grants through the Strategic Growth Council, but the language was watered down simply to say that this is the Legislature's intent. With such broad support, it seems likely that Brown will sign the bill. An excellent rundown of the bill was prepared by the Manatt law firm. The redevelopment bill, SB 1, continues to mirror last year's bill, permitting the creation of a "sustainable communities investment authority" with limited access to tax-increment financing if both the city and the county agree to it. The redevelopment areas to be created would be limited to transit-rich locations, "small walkable areas," and clean energy manufacturing sites. Although the bill appears likely to pass the Legislature for the second year in a row, there is no reason to believe Brown has changed his mind on vetoing it.

In the pantheon of developer complaints about the California Environmental Quality Act, perhaps the most common one is that it's too easy to use it to file crazy lawsuits purely for the purposes of gumming up the works. Which is maybe why the building industry and property rights advocates have spent so much time lately filing CEQA lawsuits apparently designed to gum up the works. It's hard to know exactly how seriously to take these lawsuits – especially in the context of endless and unsuccessful efforts at CEQA reform, which are stymied in large part by citizen activists and labor unions that often use CEQA as leverage over the developer or the retail business attending to construct a new project. Nevertheless, the building industry does appear to be trying to use CEQA, increasingly, to attack environmental protections. This appears to be especially popular in the Bay Area. Exhibit No. 1 is the recent lawsuit by the California Building Industry Association, using CEQA to attack the creation of significance thresholds, which any lead agency must create in order to comply with CEQA. The case challenged the creation of significance thresholds by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which CBIA said required a CEQA analysis. You can read the details of the case here , but the bottom line is that CBIA attempted to persuade the courts that CEQA should apply to CEQA. The First District Court of Appeal didn't buy the argument, saying the 7,000-page administrative record was probably sufficient. Exhibit No. 2 – also from the Bay Area – is the Pacific Legal Foundation's lawsuit against One Bay Area, the region's sustainable communities strategy prepared by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments pursuant to SB 375. In that lawsuit, filed in July, PLF claimed that – hold on to your hats – MTC and ABAG should have included in the EIR an alternative proposed by PLF's client, Bay Area Citizens. The BIA's Bay Area affiliate filed a separate lawsuit with a variety of separate CEQA arguments. Not surprisingly, the PLF lawsuit has a more ideological, value-laden tone than the BIA lawsuit. It calls One Bay Area "wrongheaded" and repeatedly calls the approved scenario "low-performing," meaning that the proposed rail transportation projects will cost a lot of money without generating very many riders. Claiming that One Bay Area should have discounted emissions reductions from the Pavley bill and other state measures before crafting the land use scenario, the lawsuit claims: "The upshot of the Final Report's use of a higher-than-actual greenhouse gas baseline is to create the false impression that especially draconian land-use measures are needed to meet the region's SB 375 targets. Thus, the Final Report's approach is irreconcilable with CEQA' s requirement that the environmental baseline normally constitute existing physical conditions, not a hypothetical condition or legal fiction." The lawsuit's bottom line is that MTC and ABAG should have considered Bay Area Citizens' alternative, which included such action as "insist that local communities be informed of the public subsidy costs of affordable housing before the assignment of regional housing needs assessment allocations" and "insist that local communities be informed of the unfunded mandates involved with the obligation to provide affordable housing before that obligation is accepted."   To be honest, the lawsuit overall is pretty repetitious. But the bottom line is clear: ABAG and the MTC didn't use CEQA to do what the Pacific Legal Foundation wanted, so PLF sued. The BIA lawsuit against One Bay Area is more reasoned – not surprising considering the lead counsel is Mike Zischke of Cox, Castle & Nicholson, probably the state's most skilled CEQA lawyer on the development side. (Though it's true that Zischke was also the plaintiff's lawyer in the "CEQA-doesn't-apply-to-CEQA" case.) Zischke's lawsuit claims that MTC and ABAG basically didn't follow CEQA in adopting One Bay Area. The lawsuit claims that the agencies diligently followed CEQA up to a point and then – caving to environmentalist pressure to limit housing in the Bay Area – essentially adopted a plan before doing the environmental impact report. The adopted plan, BIA claims, will require the exporting of 100,000 units of housing out of the Bay Area to the Central Valley and other locations. This last lawsuit at least has some logic to it. CEQA practitioners often struggle about the project level versus the plan level. At the project level, obviously a development project in a particular location is going to have some impact on that location. But at the plan level, it should be possible to examine the relative impact of development at different locations. If Plan Bay Area doesn't plan for enough housing, that'll push the housing elsewhere, and that'll have an environmental impact.  That argument, of course, can lead to the eternal chicken-and-egg argument that seems to afflict CEQA: Does more housing supply respond to demand, or does suppressing supply suppress demand? These questions are almost impossible to answer, which is one of the reasons why CEQA analyses can be so frustrating. Which, of course, raises the bottom-line question: If the building industry and property rights advocates are so frustrated by CEQA's bottomless-pit structure, then why do they keep trying to use it so aggressively?  In a way, I suppose, it's kind of like campaign finance: If you're going to reform campaign finance, you have to win election and re-election to public office, and that means you have to raise a lot of money under the system you want to reform. Similarly, I guess, if you want to try push the building industry's agenda in the regulatory maze that is California planning, you have to use whatever tools are available to you – even if you are simultaneously trying to reform or kill those same tools over in Sacramento. Still, it doesn't seem to me that "kill CEQA before I use it again" is a strong lobbying argument.

So, what did Sen. Darrell Steinberg's last-minute switcheroo mean for CEQA reform? More than you might think. As you may have heard, during the last week of the Legislative session, Steinberg gave up on his bill to reform the California Environmental Quality Act – SB 731 – in order to focus on a bill providing CEQA breaks for a new arena in Sacramento, SB 743. He also gave up on his redevelopment revival bill, SB 1, even though that bill was just one slam-dunk Assembly floor vote from the governor's desk. The irony is that after fighting rear-guard actions all summer against both CEQA critics and CEQA defenders on SB 731, Steinberg actually got some significant reform at the last minute in the Sacramento arena bill. By moving quickly at the end of the session – something he prohibited former Sen. Michael Rubio from doing last year -- he also freed himself from the morass that 731 had gotten bogged down in. And since Steinberg reportedly pulled the switcheroo after meeting with Brown, it seems likely Brown will sign the bill. The two most important changes have to do with (1) parking and visual impacts of infill projects, and (2) the possibility of giving the Brown Administration a run at traffic level-of-service analysis in infill locations. The bill also eliminated a 2009 sunset date for the creation of "infill opportunity zones" under state law. The first issue  is likely to have an immediate impact on how infill projects are handled under CEQA. SB 743 says that parking and visual impacts shall not be considered significant impacts on infill projects. There's some wiggle room here for local design standards, but this is still a pretty big deal. Even the intent language is a big deal, because it is clearly designed – maybe for the first time in the history of CEQA – to put traffic in its place at least in infill locations: "It is the intent of the Legislature to balance the need for level of service standards for traffic with the need to build infill housing and mixed use commercial developments within walking distance of mass transit facilities, downtowns, and town centers and to provide greater flexibility to local governments to balance these sometimes competing needs." The free pass for parking and visual impacts only applies to infill parcels – that is, parcels that are surrounded on three sides by development – in transit priority areas, defined as areas within a half-mile of a major transit stop. A major transit stop in state law typically means any rail stop, or any bus stop with 15-minute headways. In practical terms, what this means is that parking and visual impacts wodn't trip an environmental impact report on an infill project and therefore the likelihood of prolonged litigation on infill projects is significantly reduced. The provision of SB 743 dealing with levels of service is potentially far more significant, though it might take a while to play out. The bill requires the Governor's Office of Planning & Research to prepare new significance thresholds for noise and transportation impacts in infill locations. This was undoubtedly part of the conversation with Brown, because OPR is eager to take a run at levels of service. The ‘90s-era congestion management act basically requires CEQA analysis to take traffic congestion into account. This has led to a situation where the traffic analysis consumes more time and attention than anything else in a CEQA analysis; and it has made approval of infill projects an uphill battle because, obviously, traffic congestion is more likely to be present in an infill location than a greenfield location. CEQA practitioners around the state are struggling to figure out how to either revise or jettison the level of service standard – often simply giving up and acknowledging that LOS "F" (the worst congestion) is simply inevitable and therefore acceptable. It's well-known that OPR wants to take a run at a new level of service standard – this was one of the many topics of OPR's proposed changes to SB 731 – and this provision will give the office a chance to come up with something. All this does not mean that the other proposed changes contained – or potentially contained – in SB 731 are dead. This year is the first year of a two-year legislative session, and so Steinberg simply carried 731 over to next year.  The same is true for SB 1. This bill would revive tax-increment financing on a limited basis with no impact to the state's general fund when a city, a county, and special districts agree on a strategy that conforms with the sustainable communities strategy. Brown vetoed the same bill last year but Steinberg vowed to bring it back – he introduced as SB 1 in order to make a point – and claimed he had a better shot this year at getting Brown to sign it.  If Steinberg had permitted the last Assembly floor vote to occur, however, SB 1 would have gone to Brown's desk; and if Brown vetoed it, Steinberg would have had to start over again next year. By holding it over, he can move quickly early next year and hope that Brown signs the bill – Steinberg's last year in the Senate before he is termed out.

Two years ago, when Redevelopment 1.0 ended, it was widely viewed as the end of an era – but maybe not the end of redevelopment. Maybe it would no longer be possible to use tax-increment financing to solve all urban development and infrastructure problems. But surely a new set of techniques would emerge, either as a result of state law (after all, Gov. Jerry Brown promised a replacement) or because local officials and developers would get creative. Redevelopment 2.0 might not be as powerful, but something good would come along. We're still waiting. Gov. Jerry Brown is so down on a new redevelopment regime that Senate leader Darrell Steinberg didn't even both to put legislation on his desk this year, even though the new legislation won't affect the state's general fund and even though he could have gotten it passed in the Legislature. Meanwhile, most cities that had active redevelopment agencies are snarled in the redevelopment wind-down process. Interestingly, in most cases the hangup has not been the local oversight committee – the committee of local taxing entities that must approve or deny the continuation remaining redevelopment projects – but the state Department of Finance, which has the final word. And that has slowed down any local creativity about Redevelopment 2.0. As the end of redevelopment was pending in 2011, it was thought that the oversight committees would be a tough hurdle to get past, as representatives from counties and school districts would rein in any city's ambitious effort to extend redevelopment in order to protect their own share of the tax increment. As it turns out, however, it's not the oversight committees that are tough – it's the state Department of Finance's beancounters, which is charged with protecting the state general fund in the redevelopment wind-down and is doing so ferociously. So cities have had to devote most of their effort to dealing with DOF. Under the law, cities and DOFT must agree on the Recognized Obligation Payment Schedule (or ROPS) every six months during the wind-down, meaning cities are almost in negotiations with DOF on ROPS-related items. And cities are now moving forward to DOF with their long-term property management plans, also required under the law, which will lay out the ultimate disposition (sale, development, transfer to the city) of each piece of property formerly owned by a redevelopment agency.  And all that back-and-forth DOF means that cities haven't had time to figure out Redevelopment 2.0. They're still dealing with the detritus of Redevelopment 1.0, and understandably they can't see past that problem. Meanwhile, urban redevelopment in California remains a major challenge – and, not surprisingly, the fundamental problem is finding the money required to make urban projects and urban neighborhoods work. Developing individual projects and whole neighborhoods requires two basic things: First, money to cover the significant cost of infrastructure and community amenities required to support new development; and, second, a market strong enough to make individual development projects pencil out. In post-Prop. 13 California – at this point, the entire working life of most planners and developers in California – the trend has been toward loading the infrastructure onto private developers, because it was hard to get the infrastructure money out of the tax flow. That means a bias toward upscale projects, because only in upscale situations is the market strong enough to cover all infrastructure and amenity costs and still make projects pencil. And that's one of the reasons redevelopment was so popular. In an era where regular tax flows didn't cover the infrastructure and amenity cost and tax increases weren't popular, it was a way to cut the Gordian knot and make projects work in places that couldn't support extremely high-end development. Over the past decade, some urban neighborhoods have become so hot that private development projects pencil on their own. But that's still not true in lower-income neighborhoods; and in an urban, infill setting it's almost impossible for any private development project to cover the cost of infrastructure and amenities. So that's the problem California cities are left with: How to write down the cost of development in lower-income neighborhoods; and how to cover the cost of infrastructure and amenities in every urban neighborhood experiencing incremental infill development. Whatever Redevelopment 2.0 winds up being, that's what it has to do.  There's a big toolbox out there that cities are gradually discovering; and there are lots of ideas out there other than tax increment that could be added to the toolbox if state law can be revised.  Generally speaking, there are four categories all these tools fall into: Value Capture. This is essentially what tax-increment is – capturing the increase  in property values by appropriating a portion of the increased property tax flows. But there are other ways to capture value, such as assessment and Mello-Roos districts and the potential for a revised infrastructure finance district law that doesn't require a two-thirds vote.  Most of these, however, require increasing taxes on property owners and developers, rather than diverting the increased tax flow. Patient capital. Urban development is a slow and complicated process. So the idea of patient capital becomes far more important than it used to be. Patient capital can come in the form of underutilized land owned by public agencies or institutions; or in the form of investment funds from philanthropies or specialized institutions such as Enterprise or LISC. The catch here is that even patient capital investors want something – an eventual return, affordable housing, and so on. Tax credits. There are still some federal tax credits out there that pop, most importantly the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and the New Markets Tax Credit, which focuses on non-residential projects. But these are limited and must be allocated rigorously Increased density. Whatever problems it creates for neighborhoods, increased density can solve a lot of the problems urban development faces. In a strong market, it can generate development projects that can be used for infrastructure and amenities. In a weak market, it can help attract more below-market money, principally for affordable housing. But, of course, it is often a huge political battle to obtain. Yet even combining all these techniques, Redevelopment 2.0 is likely to be a lot harder than Redevelopment 1.0 was, for two reasons. First, a lot of the techniques above are best suited for a project rather than major district-level redevelopment – and that makes it more difficult to put together the major infrastructure and amenity packages without big tax increases. And second, as the list above suggests, the transaction cost of even a project is likely to go up. Redevelopment deals were complicated, but big projects could often be done in one fell swoop with tax increment. Now, redevelopment deals will look like affordable housing deals, with the many layers of financing and complicated structure. The bottom line is that there will be no magic bullet for Redevelopment 2.0. Yes, tax-increment may return in a limited form someday. Yes, all techniques above may be combined to do deals. But all of the above – and probably tax increases too – will have to be combined to turn around an ailing urban district.

We're pretty sure at this point that the California Environmental Quality Act does not apply to itself. (www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3395). But we're still not quite sure whether CEQA applies "in reverse." Does it require developers to consider not just their projects' effects on the environment, but also the potential effects on their projects from environmental hazards like landslides, earthquakes, or rising sea levels? By appealing the same case that concluded, "CEQA does not apply to CEQA," the California Building Industry Association (CBIA) is hoping to resolve that issue once and for all. And if it doesn't , then we might have to go back to actually planning Of all the bizarre feedback loops built into CEQA, the idea that the law might apply to itself is certainly one of the weirdest of all. The First District Court of Appeal knocked that idea down last summer in California Building Industry Association v. Bay Area Air Quality Management District , 218 Cal.App.4th 1171, by ruling that the Bay Area air district's significance thresholds are not subject to a CEQA analysis. But in so doing, the First District ducked the other bizarre CEQA question we're all facing today: Namely, does CEQA apply "in reverse"? CBIA appealed the First District ruling to the Supreme Court – which took the case primarily to resolve that issue. "CEQA-In-Reverse" simply means this: We all know that CEQA is supposed to apply to a project's impacts on the environment. But does it also apply to the environment's impact on the project? That is, if a project would place people in the way of harm because of a pre-existing environmental problem – or, more to the point, a potential future problem – does the CEQA analysis have to cover that? Do applicants have to mitigate that possible problem? Can projects be turned down on that basis? We all thought we knew the answer: No. In maybe the most important CEQA case in the last few years, the Second District Court of Appeal ruled in 2011 that CEQA does not require an analysis of the environment on the project. In Ballona Wetlands Land Trust v. City of Los Angeles (www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3121), 201 Cal.App. 4th 455, the First District ruled that the CEQA analysis of the Playa Vista project near Venice did not have to include an analysis of sea-level rise, for the simple reason that sea-level rise isn't caused by the project. In Ballona Wetlands , the court specifically took the state to task for the language of CEQA Guidelines Section 15126.2(a), which said that if a project was proposed to be constructed on a previously identified earthquake fault – thus putting people in harm's way – the potential danger had to be addressed in the CEQA analysis. In concept, Ballona Wetlands makes sense. It's a pretty well-established constitutional principle that you can't make developers mitigate more than their fair share of the problems they create. So it stands to reason that they should have no responsibility for problems that they have nothing to do with. Except why would you deliberately put people in harm's way by building a project in a dangerous location? Surely, if there is any purpose to planning at all, it is to eliminate the possibility that people will be harmed or killed because a development project is washed away or crumbles to the ground because of an earthquake. Indeed, this was the reason why – in the end – Los Angeles County eventually won the infamous First English Lutheran Church case back in the 1980s. Sure, it was possible, as the Supreme Court said (at 482 U.S. 304), for regulation to create a temporary taking. But in the end, L.A. County prevailed because rebuilding the First English church camp in Tujunga Canyon wasn't safe. Concern for public safety was also why CEQA practitioners around the state were having trouble with Ballona Wetlands – it went against their basic understanding of why we do planning at all. Nevertheless, it appeared to be settled law – at least until the CBIA v. BAAQMD case came along and implicitly (though not explicitly) reversed it. We'll see what the Supreme Court does. So, on the face of it, the end of "CEQA-In-Reverse" doesn't make sense. But no matter what the Supreme Court says, the truth of the matter is that it's a perfectly reasonable position to take under CEQA. And it might remind us that we're fundamentally in the business of planning, not CEQA analysis. In California, we often use CEQA analysis as our default method of getting a developer to do something – as if we have no other way of doing it. (In this way, CEQA's kind of like redevelopment used to be – the catch-all tool that we think is required to solve absolutely all problems.) So if we don't want a developer to build a project in an earthquake zone, or a place where sea-level rise is predicted to have an impact, then the most obvious thing to do is hit the developer with a significant impact under CEQA and take it from there. But Ballona Wetlands is right in one sense: Sea-level rise or an earthquake fault isn't the developer's fault. So if we are going to stop a developer from building in those locations, we can't do it under CEQA. We have to use actual planning. There is, for example, the Alquist-Priolo Act, which permits local governments to restrict development around earthquake faults. As the ultimate outcome of First English reminded us, there's also public health and safety, which in that case – and many others – ultimately trumped the landowner's property rights. The public health and safety power also means that planners can use zoning – for example, to restrict housing development near sources of air pollution. Sea-level rise is a trickier question, because there is no existing law to protect against it and the extent of it is pretty speculative. This is why, with Ballona Wetlands on the books, local planners are anxiously awaiting the Coastal Commission's guidance on sea-level rise. But existing regulatory mechanisms – such as health and safety findings – might give planners an important tool to protect against sea-level rise. As California planners, CEQA drives us crazy. But it also makes us lazy. Because we're so afraid of how it works, we also tend to try to use it for everything. If "CEQA-In-Reverse" doesn't survive, that might actually be a good thing. Because it might force us to actually use planning in order to plan.

The end of redevelopment has never turned into a cash cow for the state, as Gov. Jerry Brown hoped back in 2011. And while the 2012 cleanup law – AB 1484 – has clarified the rules, cities are still losing most lawsuits against the state that seek to retain former redevelopment funds. That was the message from three lawyers at the Nossaman law firm who gave an update on redevelopment at the California Chapter, American Planning Association , conference in Anaheim on Monday. Overall, it was a tale that seemed to suggest everyone is getting less than they had hoped for – not only the locals but the state as well. "The amount of money -- the $1.7 billion that was gonna just come flying in to the state -- has not materialized," Nossaman lawyer Rick Rayl said. "The assets have produced a lot less than anyone ever thought. If you asked Gov. Brown, he might second-guess the whole decision. I don't think it has accomplished what he intended." AB 1484 created a much more constructive relationship between the successor agencies and the Department of Finance and in particular took the pressure off a possible fire-sale of real estate assets by authorizing successor agencies to prepare long-range property management plans subject to state approval. These plans permit agencies to lay out long-term plans for developing or selling former redevelopment agency assets in a way that will maximize value. Many cities have complained that DOF turns long-range property management plans are very slowly, but Rayl's colleague Jeff Stava said DOF is actually picking up the pace and getting faster and more responsive to successor agency requests. Among the other pending issues facing successor agencies: Disposition of some 180 lawsuits against DOF – most of which seek to permit the successor agencies to retain former redevelopment funds or real estate assets over DOF's objections. DOF has won most of these cases at the trial court level and the cases are only beginning to trickle up to the appellate courts. How to maintain a good credit rating for both the successor agency and the underlying city when $11 billion in redevelopment bonds have been downgraded to junk status. This is especially important as successor agencies begin refinancing bonds – a practice other taxing entities like but, according to Stava, many successor agencies are not motivated to undertake because the underlying city will only receive 15-20% of the benefit. Whether and how to spend proceeds from so-called "Mardi Gras" bonds – bonds issued during the hectic period in early 2011 when redevelopment agencies were trying to beat a pending deadline for dissolution. One legislative bill, SB 1129, would actually clarify this issue and allow some of the bond proceeds to be spent.

The SB 743 roadshow went to Anaheim over the weekend, where the Governor's Office of Planning & Research – along with Ron Milam from Fehr & Peers – faced an overflow crowd and probed deeply into OPR's proposal to dump traffic congestion as a significant impact under the California Environmental Quality Act. And the discussion showed just how much the OPR proposal is turning the CEQA's traditional assumptions about traffic on their head. The Sunday afternoon session at the California Chapter, American Planning Association , conference came only two days after a similar overflow session in San Diego on Friday . At that session, OPR's Chris Ganson and Chris Calfee acknowledged that their proposed CEQA Guideline amendments might override local general plans on the issue of traffic congestion. But the addition of Milam – one of California's sharpest CEQA traffic minds – gave the Sunday session much more depth in raising questions about how the new guidelines might work. Over the summer, OPR issued a proposed set of CEQA Guideline amendments that would replace level of service with vehicle miles traveled as the main tool to assess the traffic impact of plans and projects under the environmental review law. Since then, local government planners and traffic engineers have been worried that they will no longer have enough clout to extract traffic mitigations from developers. Much of the discussion on Sunday revolved around the question of induced travel created by additional highway capacity – and whether, under CEQA, additional capacity might actually wind up creating a significant impact, rather than serving as mitigation. Under the LOS standard, congestion can be a significant impact and so therefore additional capacity can be a mitigation. But under the OPR proposal, congestion can't be considered a significant impact, while big increases in VMT can be. So, if additional lanes mean freeflowing traffic, and freeflowing traffic induces travel, VMT might go up – and trigger a significance threshold under CEQA. One audience member posted this question: If the Regional Transportation Plan and the Sustainable Communities Strategy has identified the need for a widened road – and the plan-level environmental impact report is done – will project-level environmental review have to look at induced travel? "The simple answer," Milam said, "is yes." But both he and the OPR representatives emphasized that a VMT metric might drive lead agencies in the direction of adding either density or a greater mix of land uses as a mitigation measure to drive VMT down – and this may have some effect on congestion as well.  Regarding the fear that local governments have of losing leverage over developers, Milam acknowledged: "It's as if we're playing golf while taking our seven-iron away." But he added that lead agencies must take a much broader view about how transportation analysis will be changing under CEQA. "We've become dependent on LOS as a way to get ad-hoc mitigation," he added. "Traditionally we want to look through the one lens, LOS, which is largely a traffic operations metric. … What's happened with 743, is we're starting to balance the playing field by introducing accessibility, access to goods and services. Access is not a traffic operations metric … It's helping understand how efficient our networks are." Milam and Calfee both emphasized once again that local governments can still use their police power and their general plan policies to extract increases in roadway capacity from developers. Calfee emphasized that the proposed guidelines are still a long way from adoption. He indicated that based on the comments received at these and other forums, OPR will likely change the proposed guidelines. If the changes are significant, OPR will likely circulate them again informally – and after that turn the guidelines over to the Natural Resources Agency for a formal rulemaking process with yet more comment periods.

In recent weeks, we've seen a lot of moves that suggest it may be time to change the way California funds transportation, including the following: Board of Equalization Member George Runner has been touting a 21% cut in the gas tax as part of the "fuel tax swap" formula from a few years ago. A committee headed by former San Diego City Councilmember Jim Madaffer is looking at how to implement a mileage tax as an alternative to the gas tax. Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins has proposed  a $52 annual fee on most drivers as a way to raise almost $2 billion for road repairs. The gas tax isn't the only source of funds for transportation in California, of course. Local transit agencies and some local street and road repairs are funded by the sales tax on gasoline – not the same, obviously, as the gas tax. Most large counties have an additional sales tax on gasoline to pay for transportation and road repairs. But most of the state's big-ticket transportation projects are paid for out of the gas tax, and the buying power of that funding source has been in decline for decades. Typical of California public finance, the whole gas tax story is so convoluted it's nearly impossible to understand, primarily because of the "fuel tax swap" back in 2010, which increase the gas tax in exchange for reducing the sales tax on gasoline. But for all practical purposes the gas tax has not increased since the year that today's college seniors were born – 1994. (Yes, the tax has increased but only as part of a deal that reduced other taxes to maintain the pool of transportation revenue even.) Since then, the state has added about 7 million new residents. Yes, gas tax revenues have gone up in recent years. But hybrid engines and greater fuel efficiency has cut into the growth in gas tax revenues. The value of every sales tax dollar has dropped by 40% due to inflation. Taxable sales of gasoline dropped every year from 2005 to 2013, though it's since recovered. It's no wonder, then, that the state and its local governments still struggle to pave streets and roads and fund the long list of transportation projects that comes to Sacramento for consideration every year. And it's no wonder that the gas tax looks to be on its last legs. Though it's technically a tax on the purchase of gasoline, the gas tax has always functioned in effect as a user fee: The more you drive, the more you pay. And the gas tax has always been the financial foundation for the California freeway system. It was the passage of what was then known as the Collier-Burns Act in 1947 – which increased the gas tax by 50% -- from 3 to 4.5 cents per gallon – that funded the freeway system and helped California avoid toll roads in the postwar era. (Gas cost 23 cents a gallon at the time.) For most of the postwar era, the gas tax formula worked fine. But a wide range of factors – inflation, the rising environmental and labor costs of transportation projects, and better fuel mileage to name just a few – have conspired to undermine the gas tax as a stable funding source. Policymakers in California have known about this problem for a long time. I can remember back in the ‘90s running into Richard Katz – then the chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee – shaking his head. He'd just gotten pathbreaking California's electric vehicle law passed, only to realize that if it worked it would reduce the gas tax revenues he needed to move other parts of the transportation agenda. In case you haven't noticed, the federal government has had the same problem. Rather than raise the gas tax – or reduce transportation spending – Congress has been shoring up the federal transportation trust fund by borrowing billions of dollars every year from the federal general fund. So California – like other states and he federal government – is faced with a bunch of tough choices. Here are some of the things the state might do: Raise the gas tax – though this is both politically difficult and, for the reasons described above, an imperfect approach. (Among other things, the fuel tax swap has resulted in California having one of the highest gas taxes in the country.) Switch to a mileage tax – something that may have legs in California, since the main criticism seems to be that the government will know your driving habits, which is a Republican criticism rather than a Democratic one. Create some additional fee on drivers, as Speaker Atkins has proposed – though there might be some pushback against this as being an additional tax. Or, of course, live with the money we get now. This last one is tough but actually worth thinking about. The problem for both states and the federal government in recent years has been pretty simple: There's enough money to maintain the transportation system we have  or  build new transportation facilities, but there's not enough money to do both. That's why some mostly left-wing advocates have argued for a "fix-it-first" approach, on the theory that focusing on maintenance will mean the current system will be in better shape but sprawl will be discouraged because new facilities won't be built. Even conservative politicians, of course, like to be able to cut ribbons on new facilities, so "fix it first" may not have legs. But something has to give. The gas tax era is over.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a spiel by one of the founders of a new startup called Feastly , which is trying to pair up chefs with diners. Chefs wake up in the morning, go into their kitchen, prepare whatever they want, put out a call on the Internet - and if it's something you want to eat, you go to their house and dine. Feastly, in other words, turns every dining room into a restaurant.

I’ve lived in both cities. I’ve devoted most of my professional career to understanding the two of them. And, conflicted as I am about who to root for in the World Series, I’ll say this: It’s a great matchup because Los Angeles and Houston are so similar as urban places – the two largest cities in the American Sun Belt. And as a current Houstonian and former Angeleno, it’s worth saying that Los Angeles holds important lessons – good and bad – about our future. When I moved to Houston three years ago – after living in Southern California for thirty years – the thing that struck me more than anything was how similar its urban form is to Los Angeles. An enormous, low-rise city laid out on a grid across a gigantic coastal plane. Glued together by a highly developed freeway system. Punctuated by large job centers scattered across the landscape. Slowly realizing that maybe cars aren’t the answer to everything. And gradually rediscovering the underlying natural environment that gave rise to the city in the first place. Over time, I’ve come to see that even in non-physical terms, the two cities are similar. Demographically, this similarity is really striking. Both cities are about 40% Hispanic, and their metro areas have an enormous array of nationalities and ethnicities. The only big demographic difference is that, because it was traditionally a Southern city, Houston has a larger African-American population. But even in that case, what’s important is not the difference but the connection . Los Angeles’s black population migrated largely from Texas and Louisiana, and the connections back and forth are important. (In Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins novels, Easy lives in South-Central but grew up in the Fifth Ward.) As one of the westernmost historically black colleges and universities, Texas Southern draws more than its share of Angelenos. And among other ethnic groups, Houston is increasingly viewed as an affordable alternative to Los Angeles. Houston has the largest Vietnamese population outside of California, and the relationships among East Asian communities in particular is strong. Not long ago I spoke with a dentist and his wife of Chinese extraction who grew up in Los Angeles and then lived in the East and the Midwest. They settled in Houston because of the large Chinese population and the general view that, if they couldn’t afford to live in Los Angeles, Houston was the next-best place to be a Chinese-American. It’s a little facile too easy to say that Houston and L.A. are similar because they grew up as postwar auto-oriented cities. It’s important to understand that, at least at their core, both cities are older than you might think. Yes, they are the two largest cities in the Sun Belt. But they have been the two largest cities in the Sun Belt since 1950 , when Houston passed New Orleans as the largest city in the South. L.A. emerged early as a center of aerospace and manufacturing, Houston as a center of cotton trading and then energy. Both benefited greatly from World War II industrialization. Both are port cities, and in fact the expansion of the Panama Canal is likely to increase the competition between the ports. Both had – and still have – enormous freight rail infrastructures, which are deeply interconnected. (It’s not unusual for freight traffic in L.A. to get screwed up because of some snafu in the Port of Houston.) Nevertheless, it is true that they both boomed in the 30 years after World War II to become the poster children for Sun Belt sprawl, both good and bad. L.A. and Houston were carpet-bombed with basic, low-amenity suburban tracts in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Yet they have also been centers of urban innovation. When I was a young urban planner learning about “new towns,” everything I read kept leading me back to Irvine and The Woodlands, which are similarly innovative as master-planned communities. Even in baseball, the two cities were leaders of postwar suburban innovation. Dodger Stadium and the Astrodome – dating from 1962 and 1965, respectively – were hands down the two most important and innovative baseball stadiums built between the 1920s and the 1990s. These were the stadiums that led the way with exploding scoreboards, varied cuisine, and ample parking. (See Josh Stephens’s CP&DR review of a new book about Dodger Stadium.) As I learn more about this moment in Houston’s history, I am struck by the similarities with the Los Angeles I lived in during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The emerging world-class traffic problems. (The 610 Loop around The Galleria reminds me so much of the 405 on the Westside.) The dependence on traditional industries that may not be around forever. The struggles of a black-white city accommodating a wide range of emerging ethnicities, especially a fast-growing Hispanic population. The unaffordable housing. The gradual coming to terms with the idea that a world-class city must be urban, not suburban, in nature. And so what can Houston learn from L.A.? My takeaway is: Don’t wait too long to embrace the need to be a more urban place. For Los Angeles, the tipping point came in the ‘90s, when traffic got so bad Angelenos began to realize they would never be able to fix the problem with more freeway lanes. Since then, L.A. has embarked on the largest transit construction effort of any American city in the last 100 years. It will pay off in the long run, but in the short run traffic is still miserable, the transit oases are few and far between, and Angelenos are taxing themselves to death trying to get ahead in the process. So don’t get too far behind the curve – in transportation, housing, and diversifying the economic base. Oh, and by the way: I’m not really having a hard time deciding who to root for. The Dodgers are a great ballclub. But the Astros are the most exciting, fun young team I’ve seen in a really long time.

A local judge has ruled that the City of Dublin should have conducted an environmental analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act before placing a measure on the ballot that would permit development in an area previous protected under the city’s Open Space Initiative.

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