Search Results

A companion measure to SB 69 is making its way through the State Legislature to help cities that, like Jurupa Valley , were hit by the 2011 budget cuts just when they had agreed to serve new areas, though with respect to annexations rather than incorporations. AB 1521, sponsored by Assemblyman Steve Fox (D-Palmdale), would benefit cities that, as of 2011, had recently completed annexations of inhabited county lands and had been expecting state support for their increased service levels. It would commit state General Fund money to reinstate fee allocations that previously came from vehicle license fee (VLF) funds. Lobbyist Jason Gonsalves, who represents several Riverside County cities, said the new legislation would provide $4 million a year to cities to pay for service costs in those recently annexed areas. AB 1521 differs from SB 69 in offering a future source of revenue for ongoing costs, as opposed to SB's 69 narrow focus on making up for past cuts to four Riverside County cities. "It's not to restore funding lost, but to give them a way to cover services in areas they annexed," Gonsalves said. VLF funds were taken from the cities in 2011 when the state sought new sources of revenue to pay for prison realignment. At the time, many of the affected cities responded by cutting public safety costs. A legislative analysis of the new bill said $4 million in cuts affected a number of cities, including Chico, San Ramon, Santa Clarita, Temecula, Fontana, San Jose, Porterville, Tulare and Visalia, that had annexed inhabited areas. The measure might also encourage other cities to do infill annexations, Gonsalves said. Although it would raise funding for cities throughout the state, AB 1521 hasn't won the support of the influential California State Association of Counties. According to legislative summaries it does have support from several city governments and county LAFCOs, and from the League of California Cities. AB 1521 passed the Assembly in May and goes to a State Senate Governance and Finance Committee hearing on June 25.

California's youngest city, which has fought for survival since its formation, is still in critical condition, but lately there are signs it has moved off life support.     Jurupa Valley, a Riverside County city of 95,000, was expecting death by disincorporation earlier this year because it could not replace a lost source of funding for new towns. But the city has been able to postpone plans to disincorporate for another year due to increased tax revenue and budgetary changes. And hopes have emerged for its longer-term future via state-level efforts.     The City Council voted to disincorporate in January 2014, with the expectation that within two years they would complete the first official unmaking of a California city since the 1970s. (See prior CP&DR coverage in the December monthly issue and online at http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3427.) But now, city officials are saying they have enough money to last until the third quarter of 2016, when the city's payments for services are due to Riverside County.     The city is still looking to Sacramento for its longer-term salvation, hoping state legislators will approve a key bill and that Governor Jerry Brown will sign it into law. Local efforts to win Brown over have begun, including organizing schoolchildren to write to the Governor's dog.     What does all this mean for other California communities that want to incorporate? It means that the state hasn't completely righted itself following financial troubles that hit hard in 2011, and while something may be done for existing new towns, there is still not enough funding to help new cities get started.     "There's no mechanism to incorporate unless residents want to vote to immediately tax themselves," said Jurupa Valley City Councilwoman Laura Roughton.     In the halcyon days of old, cities could count on state Vehicle License Fees (VLF) to help pay some of their initial costs as they were created, before they developed their own tax bases to fund services. Those funds were wiped out for new towns in 2011 when Brown had the money diverted to prison realignment via that session's SB 89.     Jurupa Valley was hit hardest in 2011. The effective date of its referendum vote for incorporation fell two days after SB 89 went into effect, taking away expected revenue. "The rules were changed midgame, and it's amazing that it all happened," said Roughton. "The other three cities all got at least one payment. We didn't get any."     If the current appeal to Sacramento feels like deja vu, there are good reasons. It's similar to an earlier legislative dance involving the Governor. Jurupa Valley and other new towns also sought state rescue money in 2012 under AB 1098, which Brown vetoed. A further attempt via SB 56 died in the Legislature in 2013. Nothing is certain this year either but the current proposal comes out of a different financial picture and is limited to aiding a few existing new towns -- factors that may give it a better chance of becoming law.     Roughton said cityhood has been good for Jurupa Valley, despite all the financial hurdles. The city controls local land use, and its streets are cleaner, she noted.     Formation of cities helps the state meet other goals, such as providing affordable housing and creating density, said Dan Carrigg, legislative director of the League of California Cities. Incorporated cities also provide public safety improvements and planned communities, said Chuck Dalldorf, spokesman for Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside. Roth sponsored SB 56 and is the sponsor of the current bill to aid new towns, SB 69.     "If there's not a solution (to funding new cities), it's unlikely there will be incorporation again in California," Carrigg said.      Four cities in Riverside County, including Jurupa Valley, incorporated around the time when VLF funding was cut off in 2011. They were left with huge debts, and had to cut services deeply. The other three cities, Eastvale, Menifee, and Wildomar, have also been active in the last few years' efforts to recover money from the state that they planned on using for incorporation.     This year the state's fiscal health has improved, and passage of Proposition 30 in 2012 injected $6 billion into the state's budget annually. Government leaders in Riverside County pointed to those events as reasons they might get state money to help them out of their financial mess.     A related reason has to do with reduced competition for funds.     In 2011, SB 89 created new claims on the VLF money by taking it away from new cities and giving it to counties to handle prison realignment, where state prisoners were returned to county jails as a way to decrease overcrowding. So when the AB 1098 proposal in 2012 sought to transfer VLF revenue back to new cities, it created competition for the same money that counties needed for realignment. Groups such as the California State Association of Counties opposed the bill. "We were concerned about undermining realignment revenues," said Jean Hurst, a lobbyist for CSAC.     But as of the November 2012 election, Proposition 30 wrote into law that the VLF money would go to counties, Hurst said. The ballot measure allocated VLF funds to "public safety services" including realignment, so any fresh effort to help new cities had to be made separately from the use of VLF funds. SB 69 proposes to help the new cities out of the state's General Fund, and CSAC is among its supporters.     Another key change between SB 69 and AB 1098 is that it provides money only to cities that incorporated before 2012. The bill would divide about $15 million in start-up costs among Jurupa Valley and the other three newly incorporated Riverside County cities.     As initially conceived, Roth's bill, SB 69, was written to provide funds for all newly incorporated cities that would formerly have been entitled to draw on vehicle license fees for their initial costs. That would have given all future new cities in California the same claims on VLF-substitute funding as the newest Riverside County cities. But recent negotiations narrowed the bill to apply only to cities that incorporated before 2012.     "It was strictly a cost issue," said Roth spokesman Dalldorf. "We'll have to do that after the four-cities bill."     Roughton said Jurupa Valley expects to have more revenue because sales tax projections are higher, and new residences are selling again in the city. Among other things, a new Walmart opened in the city in June.     The city is also taking tentative steps that show it might be around for a while. A new budget adopted in June adds $2 million in new spending for what Roughton describes as "things... cities are required to do."     New spending has been approved for studies the city is required to perform on developer fees, an interim general plan, and examining whether the city should hire its own staff (until now, all city employees have been contractors). The city also plans to increase spending on traffic officers, following several recent local traffic fatalities.     Jurupa Valley received a two-year extension from the state Office of Planning and Research on its general plan, which was due on at the end of 2013. The city is now funding what is being called an interim general plan. It should direct growth for three or four years, according to Roughton. The interim general plan needs to be completed at the end of 2015.     Despite the Jurupa Valley City Council vote to start disincorporation in January,  there has been little followup on the process, other than a few meetings with Riverside County officials, Roughton said.     Hurst of CSAC said Riverside County officials have been helpful to the new cities. "They're essentially floating them while this gets resolved in the legislature," she said.     Roughton said the city has not been able to secure a meeting with Governor Brown, but Brown did acknowledge the four newly incorporated cities' dilemma when he visited the county earlier in the year. He asked his staff to look into the concerns.     In the meantime, Roughton is trying to raise the Governor's awareness of Jurupa Valley issues by getting local school children to write to his dog. "It's all very positive," she said. "We've tried a 'Letters to Sutter Brown' campaign to Governor Brown's dog." The letters "invited Sutter to come and visit. We have a dog park."      Roughton said unlike other cities in the state, Jurupa Valley can't declare bankruptcy. "We don't have any unfunded pensions. We don't have any debts that can be unstructured."     SB 69 will next be heard in the Assembly's Local Government Committee on June 25. Links: CP&DR on Jurupa Valley's 2011 incorporation: http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-2901 SB 89, passed 2011: http://bit.ly/1nuB1i6 AB 1098, vetoed September 2012: http://bit.ly/1lJNoKl League of CA Cities response with link to Gov. Brown's veto message: http://bit.ly/1ps1r5m Prop 30, passed November 2012: http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/past/2012/general/propositions/30/analysis.htm SB 56, died in Legislature, 2013: http://bit.ly/1p6N6Q3 SB 69, currently pending: http://bit.ly/1lhtBAX SB 1521, currently pending: http://bit.ly/1qCEuQQ

Last Friday in San Diego, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the first cap-and-trade appropriation bill as part of the state budget. This means that the Strategic Growth Council will now have $130 million to dole out next year for smart growth planning and related activities – many times more than ever before – and that number is expected to grow rapidly in the years ahead. Coming on top of the SGC's recent award of $16 million in local planning grants, the cap-and-trade appropriation news means it's a good time to take a look at how the SGC has doled out its money over the last few years and what the impact has really been. Up to now, SGC's grants program has been funded primarily by the $90 million for planning contained in Proposition 84, the 2005 initiative that was advertised as the "Safe Drinking Water Act." (The $16 million allocated by the SGC at its meeting on June was the last of the $90 million, so the cap-and-trade money came along just in time.) The SGC was created after Proposition 84 passed. The Legislature subsequently assigned it to distribute the funds in a way that encourages creation of "sustainable communities" under AB 32 -- that is, communities expected to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under California's 2006 climate change law, which calls for significant GHG reductions by 2020. The planning funds were doled out in three rounds – 2010, 2012, and 2014 – and in each case the SGC sliced the pie a different way. In 2010, for example, there was a set-aside for metropolitan planning organizations to do modeling. In 2012, there was a category for regional cooperation. In 2014, there was an environmental justice set-aside. (Disclosure: The City of San Diego, where I work, won one of the biggest grants in Round 1 and got one out of the two it applied for in Round 3.) A separate program funded planning and construction of "urban greening" projects. Two external events over the past few years made the SGC grant program more important than it otherwise would have been. The first was the economic crash of 2008, which caused local governments' general funds to shrink and thus made it more difficult for cities and counties to fund their planning efforts. The second was the end of redevelopment in 2012, which robbed local governments – mostly cities – of a funding source they had often used to do plans in specific neighborhoods. Looking at the patterns, there's no question that SGC grants have been used to fund local plans that the cities and counties might otherwise have funded on their own. This was especially true in the first and second grantmaking rounds, before general funds began to recover from the 2008 downturn. (Many of these planning efforts were also funded by similar grant programs from the state's biggest metropolitan planning organizations, which have used either federal or local transportation funds for these programs.) But in the most recent round, something interesting happened: Cities and counties weren't seeking to use SGC grants to replace lost redevelopment planning funds, as one might expect. Instead, local governments and their nonprofit partners are focusing on implementation of previous plans – especially climate action plans – as well as transportation projects. Transportation plans received many grant awards in 2014 after getting virtually none in the first two rounds. The big question, of course, is whether the SGC funds have encouraged cities and counties to undertake planning efforts focused on infill and transit-oriented development efforts that they might otherwise not have undertaken with their own money. That's the whole point of a grant program, after all – to give somebody  money to do something they might not otherwise have done in order to achieve your objective. It's hard to know what cities and counties might otherwise have done if they had more money of their own. Even in the wake of the big economic downturn in 2008, an awful lot of local governments in California continued to start up general plan updates with money that they had squirreled away – but, of course, they had to focus on GHG reductions because of AB 32 and other state laws requiring them to do so. All three rounds of grants have focused on a few basic themes, including: 1. District and corridor plans tied to transit-oriented or infill development. 2. Climate action plans or other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 3. General Plan updates focusing on such topics as GHG reduction and healthy communities. General plan updates and district or corridor plans are, of course, the bread-and-butter of local planning in California. And at the time of the first round, most cities and counties in California had realized they had to do some kind of climate action plan in order to comply with new state laws and emerging practices under the California Environmental Quality Act. But here's what's interesting: While the district and corridor plans continued apace among grantees in SGC's third round, the general plan updates and climate action plans slowed down. That's probably because, by 2014, most cities and counties had updated their general plans to reflect the new emphasis on greenhouse gas emissions. In place of General Plan updates and Climate Action Plans, cities and counties – and, in many cases, nonprofit partners working with them – focused on different things in Round 3, including: 1. Implementation of climate action plans and GHG reduction strategies. 2. Transportation plans and projects 3. Energy projects. For example, a number of cities – including Goleta near UC Santa Barbara and the ever-hip City of West Hollywood – got grants to focus on bicycle and pedestrian projects. Several others got grants to focus on various aspects of energy. These were often partnerships at the county level, including in Santa Clara, Sonoma, Butte, Monterey, and Madera Counties. The energy projects ranged from examining community choice aggregation (the ability to use small-scale, community-based energy production to break the hold of big utilities on the energy system) to experimenting with fuel cell technology. The focus on transportation and energy makes sense. Now that most local governments have big-picture plans in place for GHG emissions reduction, they actually have to produce – by switching to alternative energy sources, or by encouraging their residents to switch from driving to walking or bicycling. The shift to walking and biking – what has become known as "active transportation" – is an especially important component in meeting 2020 GHG targets because people can switch modes tomorrow, rather than waiting for big transit projects or major transit-oriented development. But in the long run, GHG reductions after 2020 are likely to depend in large part on those longer-range plans – more transit stops and more development around those stops. That's why cities and counties are still getting a lot of money from the SGC – and from the MPOs in their own grant programs – for district and corridor plans. The built environment takes a long time to change. So as SGC embarks on its huge new program with cap-and-trade money, it will be interesting to see whether this trend continues. Will SGC fund primarily implementation-type plans, such as zoning ordinances and bike/ped plans? Will there be yet more general fund updates to fund? Will corridor and district plans still be popular? Or will SGC push the locals deeper into implementation? Assuming it has hundreds of millions of dollars available in the years ahead, SGC may place a greater focus on actual construction of hard infrastructure, such as bikeways and the public realm components of transit-oriented development projects. After all, with the end of redevelopment these projects are very hard to pay for. Even though the cap-and-trade money is a drop in the bucket compared to redevelopment, the SGC may very well get pushed in the direction of using cap-and-trade money to build public realm amenities and infrastructure, not just funding plans.

Amid a dramatic show of organized public anger, Oakland Planning Commission approved the West Oakland Specific Plan on June 11. City staff, principally planner Ed Manasse, set out the plan's provisions for transit-oriented development, denser use of underused and blighted lots, separation of housing from heavy industry, concessions to second units and home businesses, and more specifically categorized rezoning -- amid shouted objections and boos from a crowd who had marched to the meeting in a protest demonstration. As chair Chris Pattillo reassured, "We can hear you," Manasse attempted to tell activists they had been heard over the course of a six-year negotiation process, even presenting a slide with critics' "Wreck the WOSP!" slogan and broken-insect cartoon. He said, "We've expanded the social equity and affordable housing recommendations, we have additional career pathway strategies for local residents, increased small business opportunities for local residents, youth development education and training, neighborhood retail, and we have additional protections for residents from displacement." "So we heard you," he said. "We know your concerns, we know that there's a lot of people that think that the neighborhood would be better off without a plan at all. That this project is somehow a secret conspiracy, a massive development project and that we are in fact encouraging gentrification and displacement. The plan is exactly the opposite to every – all of that and what we we are trying to do is to explain how that is not the case." The crowd wasn't buying it. The crowd granted applause to speakers, whether activist or business-oriented, who said the plan was not ready for approval, unclear about funding sources for some goals, arbitrarily specific about some requirements and rezonings, and too accepting of upscale condominium development. Robbie Clarke of Causa Justa/Just Cause was among those cheered for saying the plan's stated goals did not translate clearly enough into up-front guarantees of affordable housing and jobs that would be genuinely available to existing residents. Dominique Tan of the East Bay Housing Organizations said activists understood that goals such as inclusionary zoning requirements for developers to fund affordable housing needed to be imposed citywide, not one plan at a time, but she said they needed to happen soon because developers were continuing to build without such concessions. Elaine Brown, a former leader of West Oakland's own Black Panther Party, made an appearance to urge a one-year delay in the plan. She singled out "high in density, expensive housing units that would suck all the air out of" disadvantaged local residents' futures, and called for a plan that would be less friendly to developers and less willing to cause displacement. Strong though less voluble concern appeared for existing small businesses, especially where zoning changes were proposed. Discussion later in the meeting, as some of the public fury subsided, included calls for a proposed tube to enclose the elevated BART train to reduce noise, and even for moving the BART line underground.   The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the scene at http://bit.ly/1pylP54 and noted two arrests at the meeting. Late that night, according to the East Bay Express , a security camera showed masked people in black breaking the windows of the new Kilovolt Coffee shop in West Oakland. http://bit.ly/1lv1k9K. The plan goes to City Council hearings and votes in July. The plan materials are at http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/PBN/OurServices/Plans/index.htm. The agenda and archived video of the dramatic June 11 meeting are at http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/PBN/OurOrganization/PlanningZoning/o/Commissions/.

Based on archaeological findings, Native American heritage claims, a "Deny the Ridge" campaign and broad public objections, the Coastal Commission on June 12 discouraged property owner Signal Landmark into withdrawing its "Ridge Project" proposal to build 22 houses on Bolsa Chica Mesa in Huntington Beach. With the Commission leaning toward a "no" vote on the Land Use Plan revision needed for the project, Signal Landmark withdrew its project application, meaning any future construction plan for the site must start again with the local city council. The action preserves natural habitats and protects ancient artifacts -- and by many accounts, gravesites too -- at a prehistoric village complex occupied as much as 9,000 years ago. Heard in the Huntington Beach City Council chambers, the agenda item was well attended and drew fervent speakers in opposition to the project. Signal Landmark, working with developer Hearthside Homes, had offered to mitigate construction on the five-acre "Ridge" site through an agreement to preserve open space on the adjacent six-acre "Goodell Property," which it had an option to buy, plus disputed cultural mitigation proposals. Objectors' letters described the Ridge and Goodell properties as the last two privately owned open-space parcels remaining out of a 30-acre area that, as a whole, showed archaeological signs of supporting dense settlements and receiving hundreds of burials in the distant past. Signal Landmark has already obtained permits for two nearby housing complexes, known as Sandover (16 units, completed) and Brightwater (347 units approved, some as yet unbuilt). The Ridge property, if built up, would extend housing development into an unbuilt area north of the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. A Commission staff letter in the June agenda materials (at http://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2014/6/Th9a-6-2014.pdf) said that when a staff report last December suggested the Ridge site had diminished cultural and habitat value, and recommended accepting the Goodell/Ridge land swap arrangement, arguments to the contrary poured in from scholars, public agencies, environmental activists, Native American organizations and cultural preservation offices. Among these were expert opinions on the site's archaeological importance and its value as habitat for raptors and other species, potentially including burrowing owls. Additional issues raised and disputed included the width of buffers necessary around environmentally sensitive habitat areas (ESHA) and potential drainage effects on an ESHA area of eucalyptus. In this changing light, the staff began to place stricter conditions on their recommendation and the Commission postponed consideration of the matter at the city's request. (See http://lat.ms/1iDEb0b and http://bit.ly/1qnZU46.) Commission staff later shifted their recommendation to oppose the project outright. The richest discoveries of ancient settlement remains and burials have been outside the subject property at sites known as ORA-83 and ORA-85. ORA-83 is also called the "Cogged Stone Site" for its unique gearlike stone carvings, and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Project opponents' letters said all of ORA-85 and most of ORA-83 had already been destroyed by development although a cemetery area of ORA-83 was preserved. Disputed was whether a village site on the subject property, known as ORA-86, had value comparable to the other two sites, or whether the whole area including all three sites should be viewed as a single unit. Many critics of the project said yes, including members and supporters of several bands of Mission Indians, especially the Gabrielino/Tongva and Juaneño/Acjachemen, for whom the site has special cultural and spiritual significance. The local "Orange Juice Blog" headed its report of the proposal's withdrawal, "Most of HB Rejoices!" (http://bit.ly/1lNcZkv) The Bolsa Chica Land Trust site announced simply, "Withdrawn!" (http://www.bolsachicalandtrust.org). Garcia, as Mayor of Long Beach, must leave Coastal Commission Robert Garcia, mayor-elect of Long Beach, must resign his Coastal Commission seat by September 13, according to the state Attorney General's office and the Coastal Commission. The Long Beach Press-Telegram (at http://bit.ly/1q7RPhE) and the Long Beach Reporter have the story in detail, and the typographically eccentric Long Beach Reporter site has posted copies of the relevant letters, by Assistant AG John Saurenman and the Commission's executive director, Dr. Charles Lester, at http://www.lbreport.com/news/jun14/coastcom1.htm. From the letters, the Attorney General's conclusion appears to be that, because Garcia is one of the six members appointed under Public Resources Code Sec. 30301(e), he must be a currently serving county supervisor or a city council member in the Coastal Commission district he represents. As Mayor, he would be neither. Previews June, relatively speaking, was a lull in Coastal Commission business, making it possible to look back and ahead. The meeting looked forward to several expected challenges: The Commission voted to postpone consideration of implementing ordinances to finalize the Marin County Local Coastal Plan (LCP), delaying action for up to a year without setting a definite next hearing date. This spring's other big unfinished LCP, for the Santa Monica Mountains, is expected to be finalized in July through consideration and approval of its implementing ordinances. The Commission also postponed action until August on San Diego's proposed LCP revision, which includes an amendment to the La Jolla Land Use Plan and a limit on access to Children's Pool Beach during seal pupping season. The Commission's Dr. Lester warned that an extra day of hearings might have to be scheduled then to accommodate the interested speakers on the subject. Public interest is high because it pits public use of the pool at the site against concern for seals using the beach as a haulout. A four-day schedule would likely run Tuesday through Friday if one had to be arranged instead of the usual three-day agenda. One speaker on the postponement, Cheri Jacobs Aspenleiter of the RAMP disability rights group, offered a hint of the debate to expect in August. She said she swam in salt water as therapy for a spinal injury -- either by swimming in the public saltwater pool onshore, which she said is immensely valued by people who swim for therapy, or by snorkeling along the coast, where, she said, she had noticed an overpopulation of seals and underpopulation of food species such as garibaldis and mussels. (See http://bit.ly/1q8moU8 on RAMP's campaign to improve disability access to the pool.) A further look toward the future was implicit in the Commission's field trip to the Banning Ranch in Newport Beach, a site of continuing active oil drilling, of mitigation work to fix damage to coastal scrub and, significantly, of a proposal for a 1,375-unit housing development. Since the development is locally opposed, it is expected to come before the Commission at some point. See http://lat.ms/1oAAtfO. Legislation The Commission heard warm public testimony in favor of AB 1102, a measure to protect beach fire rings against removal without a coastal development permit. Even the mayor of Huntington Beach, Matthew Harper, put in a good word for beach bonfires in welcoming the Commission. He said wood fires were necessary on the beach -- not charcoal, which is less warm, or bottled gas, which leaves canisters to break and rust. He called it a beach access issue: "It's too cold to go to the beach after dark unless you have a good beach bonfire to keep it nice and warm for you." The proposal, which is now before the State Senate, responds to a procedural wrangle of litigation and local legislation, described in the most recent bill analysis posted at http://bit.ly/1lxoEiu. On a less cozy note, the Commission briefly discussed AB 976, to give the Commission power to impose fines. That bill last formally moved in 2013, but similar legislation did pass as of June 15 in the Legislature's Natural Resources budget trailer bill, SB 861. (See http://bit.ly/1na4EDS.) Staff at the meeting said fines imposed under the measure would be used to remediate the types of problems caused by the respective violations -- if not always the exact violations occasioning the fines -- and about half of such problems involved public access. As the Sacramento Bee 's Jeremy White noted online, the Natural Resources budget bill also creates a California Climate Resilience Account to address climate change and transfers regulation of drinking water from the State Department of Public Health to the State Water Resources Control Board. "Issue of 'Substantial Issue'" is an Issue Two procedural arguments from the May session spilled into June: one about the power of neighbors to appeal to the Commission, and the other about the power of Commissioners to shut down consideration of appeals. Early in the June session, the result was a tense, technical "discussion item" debate led by Commissioner Jana Zimmer. A big piece of the discussion had to do with what Zimmer termed "the issue of 'substantial issue'." That controversy arose from a debate during the May 15 Commission session (Item 14a) on whether Pullman Ditch, an intermittent stream in a suburbanized patch of Half Moon Bay waterfront, harbored rare Red-Legged Frogs or San Francisco Garter Snakes. Conclusions about the species' presence or absence in turn affected whether property owner Mark Stoloski could build four more houses near the ditch. In response to neighbors' appeal of the Stoloski project, Commission staff recommended that the Commission grant a finding of "substantial issue", which would mean finding that the appeal had sufficient merit to go forward to de novo review. (If staff had recommended against a finding of "substantial issue" they would have made a presentation rebutting the presumption that a substantial issue existed.) Skeptical about the imputed presence in the ditch of rare frogs that had not been directly seen at the site, Commissioner Zimmer raised a procedural question about a long-term standard practice for deciding if enough doubt exists among Commissioners to bother discussing the merits of a recommended "substantial issue" finding. Traditionally, the Commission chair asks for a show of at hands to determine if at least three Commissioners object to a finding of substantial issue in accordance with the staff recommendation. If three hands go up, the chair invites discussion and a vote on the question. Zimmer asked if questions could be posed on an appeal before the call for the show of hands -- significant because that would make it possible for one or two Commissioners who disagreed with a "substantial issue" staff recommendation to highlight flaws in an appeal for other commissioners before any of them took definite positions supporting or opposing de novo review. Zimmer noted Commission rules did not formally provide for the three-hand approach. She was supported on the right to ask preliminary questions by Commissioner Dayna Bochco, who expressed visible exasperation over the variably reported conditions of Half Moon Bay's frogs and ditches. Others chimed in as well. After some fuss it emerged that questions could indeed be asked before the show of hands, and Zimmer asked a few, but Commissioner Kinsey and the staff counsel urged the Stoloski hearing forward to the call for the show of hands -- three of them went up easily -- and thence to a hearing and vote on the presence or absence of "substantial issue." The appeal in the Stoloski matter was rejected by a 9-2 vote of the Commission, hence done with on the spot without a de novo review. In June the Commissioners returned to appeals procedure in a "discussion only" agenda item near the start of the June meeting (June 11 item 6d). Staff had meantime prepared a legal memo outlining Commission appeal procedure (which Zimmer suggested be distributed to all new commissioners) at http://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2014/6/W6d-6-2014.pdf. Several Commissioners reported Stanley Lamport of Cox, Castle & Nicholson, who had represented Stoloski in the Half Moon Bay matter, had weighed in with them ex parte to argue that, although the "no substantial issue" finding is an exception to a presumption in favor of a "substantial issue" finding, that didn't mean the "substantial issue" finding was actually presumed. ("Don't you just love lawyers?" asked Bochco.) Zimmer suggested making it standard procedure to seek questions from Commissioners before calling for the show of three hands. The staff memo set out appeal procedure in another area that saw controversy at the May meeting: the definition of areas where a local resident can appeal a project directly to the Commission as of right. The question came up in May because the Marin LCP converted several types of development on West Marin farmland into principally permitted uses, which are ordinarily not appealable directly to the Commission. Appeals as of right are available within specified distances of riparian or sensitive habitats and between the ocean and the nearest coastal road, whether the permits involved are "principally permitted uses" or not. The clarifying discussion in June, however, wasn't nearly as complex as the original extension of "principally permitted use" definitions had been in Marin in May. The most difficult June procedural discussion concerned the logistical difficulty of providing two Commissioners' signatures to support appeals that are recommended by Commission staff (or by any one Commissioner), as opposed to appeals brought by project proponents or members of the public. The problem -- or one of them -- is that the Commission has only a ten-working-day deadline to appeal any land-use decision by local authorities exercising LCP-delegated coastal permit authority. Commissioners complained that they were sometimes called to provide signatures at the last minute for appeals that they did not have time to read in detail before signing. Zimmer noted she had been constrained as a lawyer from placing a document before a court without feeling a personal sense that its allegations had a basis, and she felt the same about placing appeals before the Commission on staff's assurances. Commissioner Effie Turnbull-Sanders asked if staff could simply initiate their own appeals rather than make last-minute calls on Commissioners: "It may be a little bit of makework if we're called the day that an appeal is due and we're actually briefed by staff" who are better-informed, she said. Commissioner Wendy Mitchell took up the suggestion even though following it through would require a legislative Coastal Act amendment. Commissioner Gregory Cox leaned harder on the problem of logistical pressures on Commissioners to rubber-stamp appeals they had not fully reviewed: "To me it just doesn't sound right." He asked, could staff possibly discuss de minimis project changes with proponents to bring them into compliance without formal procedure? Procedurally a vote couldn't be taken on any of the questions raised, but they remained in the air, presumably deferred to the next legislative session if any. Which left an additional question in the air: whether, if invited to adjust Commission procedure, the Legislature might develop intentions of its own. Otherwise -- Santa Cruz appellant Mark Saito complained of his neighbor's construction permit, "Basically my view is being handed to my neighbor." He suggested that a cypress tree in his own back yard would be more protected if it happened to stand between the houses, so "I know this doesn't concern the Coastal Commission but it seems like the tree has more rights than I do as a neighbor." The Commission made a finding of "no substantial issue," meaning his appeal failed, and neighbors Hassan and Tooran Khayam-Bashi would be getting their permit. During a string of permit appeals on houses in Venice,  among the very last agenda items of June 13, a young father stood up to speak at public comment, surrounded by his wife and young children. He said he came from a family that had lived many generations in Venice but his own family was having to move to Inglewood. He worked in food service, he said, and for people working at food-service wages, "we can't even afford to eat a meal in our own community." He said, "We're getting pushed out and I don't think it's fair." It was not clear if he advocated any particular action on the item at hand. The item was No. 10c: to demolish a single-family house that would be tied to the adjacent lot and refitted with a two-car garage, a "second floor recreation room," a pool and landscaping. The house on the adjacent lot would get a remodel as well. The proposal was approved. The June meeting's agenda, most of it now annotated with vote results, is at http://coastal.ca.gov/mtgcurr.html. It will move to a June 2014 archive link at http://coastal.ca.gov/meetings/mtgpast.html later this month.

The on-time budget bill sent to Governor Brown on Sunday, June 15 contains a deal for use of cap-and-trade proceeds with the high-speed rail funding the Governor wanted and more housing and sustainability money than there might have been. If Brown signs the budget as is, the "Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities" program will get about $130 million in the 2014-15 fiscal year, out of a total pot of $872 million in cap and trade revenue. Then in future fiscal years starting with 2015-16, the same category will receive 20% a year of the cap and trade proceeds as one of several continuous appropriations. Half of the 20% must go to affordable housing projects designed to reduce greenhouse gases -- or at least, that's stated for the years from 2015-2016 onward. That result exceeds the $100 million for "transit oriented development grants" proposed by the Governor last winter (see http://bit.ly/1pbs4vt) but is a compromise from earlier legislative proposals that had called for as much as $400 million or 40% of cap-and-trade to fund a combination of transit, affordable housing and sustainability projects. Bill Higgins of the California Association of Councils of Government (CALCOG) linked the results to the work of outgoing Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. Higgins wrote on June 13: "Sustainable Communities and SB 375 related funding is the only thing to come out of the investment plan with the same commitment to ongoing funding as High Speed Rail. That is pretty significant. That is a direct result of Senator Steinberg's effort and leadership." The cap-and-trade budget deal figures appeared first in a Budget Conference Committee handout late June 12, then were repeated in the Assembly floor report at http://ow.ly/y2kOL. The floor report said, "In addition, when the $400 million General Fund Loan from the Cap and Trade fund is repaid, these funds are dedicated to High Speed Rail." Despite Republican opposition to the high-speed rail portion, the same numbers held almost completely steady through the budget negotiations on the completion deadline day, Sunday, June 15. Reportedly, though, Sen. Kevin DeLeon (who has since been elected Senate President pro Tem to succeed Steinberg) publicly mentioned a plan to add "cleanup" language on high-speed rail during the coming week. The figures for 2014-15 were lightly tweaked in the actual main 2014-15 appropriations bill, SB 852 (http://bit.ly/1q6vfpw), as shown by a glance at expenditures from the "Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund". An expenditure for weatherization that was given in the floor report as $75 million was shaved to just over $70 million. The "$130 million" fund for "affordable housing and sustainable communities" shows an appropriation of $129,201,000. The continuous appropriations of cap-and-trade funds for future fiscal years passed as SB 862, (http://bit.ly/1py6fJT). That same bill adds two new members to the Strategic Growth Council, which is to administer the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities funds. The provisions call for one new member to be appointed by the Speaker of the Assembly and the other by the Senate Committee on Rules. These two legislative appointees are to be added to an existing roster heavy on gubernatorial appointees: six state agency heads, the Director of State Planning and Research, and one member of the public appointed by the Governor, who is currently Robert Fisher of The Gap. If, as is likely, the new appointees are local elected officials, their membership on the board could create new complexities regarding conflicts of interest in allocation decisions. The "Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities" funding is to be allocated to the Strategic Growth Council, with the SGC to decide how to administer the "sustainable communities" funds apart from housing. SB 862 adds a new division, Sec. 75200 et seq., to the Public Resources Code to outline distribution criteria. Projects to be funded would need to be consistent with state environmental priorities and "support implementation of an adopted or draft sustainable communities strategy or, if a sustainable communities strategy is not required for a region by law, a regional plan that includes policies and programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions". Additionally they would need to fit on a list of project categories beginning with "Intermodal, affordable housing projects that support infill and compact development" and "Transit capital projects and programs supporting transit ridership." The rest of the list is similar to categories proposed earlier in the session as part of the unsuccessful AB 574 (see http://bit.ly/1kwfAu1), but adds emphasis on infill, compact development, "improving connectivity and accessibility to jobs, housing, and services," and serving disadvantaged communities. Under a separate heading, the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program and Low Carbon Transit Operations get $25 million apiece in the first fiscal year. From the second year onward they get more: 15% of the cap and trade money, of which 10% goes to transit and intercity rail, administered through CalTrans and the California Transportation Commission, and 5% goes to low-carbon transit operations, to be distributed via the State Transit Assistance formula and administered by CalTrans. All projects must report their progress in reducing greenhouse gases to the SGC and the Air Resources Board. Since 25% of cap and trade funds must benefit disadvantaged communities. The bill calls for CalEPA to work with the Air Resources Board and hold at least one public workshop before identifying which are disadvantaged communities for purposes of the allocation. This involves a revision to the existing Health and Safety Code Sec. 39711 but it hangs on to the existing broad definition of the term in that statute. A broader budget analysis by the Western Center on Law and Poverty noted that appropriations for housing included $100 million for the Department of Housing's Multifamily Housing Program and $10 million for rental and utility assistance for drought-affected households. Further it noted the passage of the Prop 41 ballot measure authorizes $600 million to house veterans and their families. Among minor benefit increases and liberalizations in the CalWORKs program (the new benefit will be $703 per month for a family of three), a $20 million appropriation is to provide "rapid re-housing" assistance. The League of California Cities has a much more detailed analysis of the main budget bill and all the trailer bills for items relevant to local governments, available at http://bit.ly/1q6I7Mo. As the new cap-and-trade budget and allocation program develops in detail, it may be helpful to watch CALCOG's resource page at http://www.calcog.org/index.aspx?nid=96 for postings of further key documents.

A budget deal was reportedly nearing as of Monday night, with the Senate's Darrell Steinberg and the Assembly's Toni Atkins talking optimistically but not too specificially. See http://www.capradio.org/articles/2014/06/09/budget-deal-nears-at-the-capitol/. No clear sign where cap-and-trade proceeds fit into that mix, but the data points include an extended lobbying press conference given June 6 by LA Mayor Eric Garcetti and senior legislators, including Steinberg and his expected successor to the State Senate presidency, Kevin De León. The videotape is available on De León's site at http://bit.ly/1jh2Ac5 -- including Steinberg's quietly gleeful aside as he introduced De León: " I'm terming out of office!" StreetsblogLA put together a graphic explaining the three current public cap-and-trade spending proposals at http://bit.ly/1u075wA. CALCOG's helpful cap-and-trade tracking page at http://www.calcog.org/index.aspx?nid=96 has been updated to include the June 3 State Senate budget hearing's modification of the Steinberg plan, and, most recently, a link to a proposal for a compromise advanced by the Legislative Analyst's Office: http://www.lao.ca.gov/handouts/Conf_Comm/2014/Cap-and-Trade-Expenditures-060414.pdf. All the proposals include hefty funding for transportation and "sustainable communities" funding, but amounts and emphases vary, with the Governor's proposal leaning toward his beloved high-speed rail program, Steinberg's toward affordable housing at transit hubs, and the Assembly's toward broad state and local categories of "Sustainable Communities" funding. New EPA rule could push more states toward cap-and-trade California's cap-and-trade program gained standing as a national model this week because of the federal EPA decision to issue a nationwide proposed rule setting state-by-state carbon caps to be met by 2030. While the rules have been criticized as weakly allowing too much state-by-state discretion, they do create incentives for more states to enter the cap-and-trade business. Ethan Elkind's underwhelmed take on the rules is at http://bit.ly/1u0i6hr, Bloomberg's report is among those seeing a possible boost to regional cap-and-trade markets, but says it's complicated, at http://buswk.co/1kVDftA. The Nation , however, quotes some warnings that an unintended result could be more pressure to use natural gas instead of coal, hence more pressure in favor of fracking: http://bit.ly/1kLE7zZ. The EPA proposed rule itself is at http://www2.epa.gov/carbon-pollution-standards/clean-power-plan-proposed-rule. LA Metro offers new Union Station plan ideas Added ideas for the "master plan" to renovate LA's historic Union Station and surround it with new structures and amenities went public in a presentation June 5, in preparation for a board of directors meeting June 18 of the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). The plan follows Metro's 2011 repurchase of the station and surrounding property from Catellus, which had owned it since 1990: http://www.greatamericanstations.com/Stations/LAX. The current proposal provides for closer bike and pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods and expanded local transit, and also looks forward to "anticipated future arrival of high speed rail" with plans for a separate terminal to welcome that fabled beast if it ever arrives. Curbed LA has a summary at http://bit.ly/1o84YJP and Metro's own announcement page is at http://www.metro.net/projects/la-union-station/. The text actually released on June 5 appears to be a collection of slides rather than a dense narrative. Metro's own summary appears at http://bit.ly/1wYbYKQ including a grand rendering of the proposed complex "in the future after the Master Plan is implemented." Proposals in the main presentation slide set at http://media.metro.net/projects_studies/lausmp/lausmp_presentation_2014_0605_revised.pdf include a call to expand territory covered by the 1996 Alameda Specific Plan, including east to the LA River and south as far as First Street. San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan would reknit East Bay suburban corridor The San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan, a joint project by the towns of El Cerrito and Richmond, went public for comment June 3 with comments due July 21. The Mercury News has a summary at http://bit.ly/1xBuetW. The detailed plan text and EIR material is at www.el-cerrito.org/spaSP. Goals of the plan include a form-based code, complete streets plan and infrastructure review with a goal of increased attention to public use of outdoor space. Strategic Growth Council grants awarded The Strategic Growth Council awarded $40 million in grants under Proposition 84, including $16 million in the Sustainable Communities Planning Grant category. The announcement is at http://sgc.ca.gov/uploads/2013/05/SGC-Awards-40m-in-Planning-and-Urban-Greening-Grants.pdf. Grant purposes include an assessment of infrastructure needs in disadvantaged areas of Tulare County and the Pioneer Bluff Redevelopment Master Plan in West Sacramento. More special legislation for Tesla As noted last week at http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3505, lots of California officials have been crowding forward to beg the privilege of hosting Elon Musk's "gigafactory" for Tesla car batteries -- amid regrets that the loss of Redevelopment tax-increment financing held back localities from promising tax expenditures to large employers. The Sacramento Business Journal now reports at http://bit.ly/1kLBCxD and http://bit.ly/1qkcIp5 on a new piece of courtship legislation for Tesla, handled as a gut-and-amend of SB 1309, now sponsored by State Sens. Steinberg and Gaines -- a Democrat and a Republican. The current placeholder draft of the bill, at http://bit.ly/1u0hGI1, promises but doesn't spell out "legislation, including, but not limited to, financial incentives and changes to regulatory and environmental processes, to expedite groundbreaking and construction in California of a large-scale battery factory to manufacture batteries for both electric-vehicle and stationary uses." As the Sacramento Business Journal notes, Musk's SpaceX company has already received special exemptions from California property tax under AB 777, which gives up local tax revenue estimated at $1 million. (See http://bit.ly/1o7I8SJ and http://bit.ly/1kVzsfQ). The Board of Equalization backed the exemption by a vote in late May defining certain rockets as "business inventory", hence as excluded from property tax for an additional reason. See http://www.boe.ca.gov/regs/reg_133_2014.htm and http://www.boe.ca.gov/meetings/pdf/2014/052214_F3_Reg133.pdf. Coastal Commission: two big votes postponed, SoCal adjustments on deck A vote to at last approve the Santa Monica Mountains Local Coastal Program is expected to be before the Coastal Commission in July, per an email form the Commission's director, Dr. Charles Lester. The remaining step to complete this long-running project is to approve Los Angeles County implementing legislation -- zoning ordinances and other potentially devilish details -- to implement the Land Use Plan approved by the Commission in April. Back in April, players in the hard-fought controversy over vineyard and farming uses were looking toward the June monthly meeting in Huntington Beach as the likely approval session, but it's not on the June agenda. So it goes to the agenda for Ventura in July. See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3474 for CP&DR's prior coverage on this issue. Last month's hardest-fought issue, the Marin County Local Coastal Program update, got a land use plan out of the May meeting but it was so loaded with complex last-minute amendments that Commission and county staff have set no date to finish resulting revisions to the implementing legislation. The implementation plan is on the Commission's June agenda only to push back the deadline for completing it to July 27, 2015. Matters on the June agenda include a Huntington Beach redesignation of five acres from open space and agriculture to residential use, a raft of adjustments to the Carlsbad and San Diego Local Coastal Programs and home renovations in Los Angeles County. The discussion-only item for appeals on Wednesday morning's CCC agenda could see some tension over the appeal of a Laguna Canyon live/work project following a site visit by a CCC staff biologist. See http://bit.ly/1n30izT for local reporting on that dispute. The Commission's June 11-13 agenda is currently at http://coastal.ca.gov/mtgcurr.html. And in the sports venue business: San Jose's Diridon Station Area Plan -- available in draft form at https://www.sanjoseca.gov/index.aspx?NID=1743 -- will go to a City Council vote today, June 10, amid complaints from bike and transit activists over what StreetsblogSF called a "parking crater" sought by the SAP Center for its "Shark Tank" hockey arena. For details see http://bit.ly/1qlRyqT. The LA City Council approved a "relatively meager $300 million renovation" of its convention center  that would leave out a sports stadium supported by the NFL: http://bit.ly/1oPjS3B The city's soccer team, Sacramento Republic FC, teamed with a group of nonprofits to back a county sales tax hike for projects including a soccer stadium: http://bit.ly/1hD1Gv7 On May 23, Judge Timothy Frawley, who has ruled in so many heavy-hitting Sacramento county court cases, threw out the current lawsuit against the Kings arena proposal, saying the suit's challenge to the arena term sheet was inappropriate because the term sheet was not binding. See http://bit.ly/1kggsCO. Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork (STOP) announced it was giving up its campaign for a referendum on the proposed Kings basketball arena, following a rebuff (also by Judge Frawley) some months before: http://bit.ly/1ljKfzc Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff announced he was close to signing a lease extension for the A's to stay in the Oakland Coliseum -- a deal that would further weight Oakland's stadium site choice decision toward the proposed "Coliseum City" model. See http://bit.ly/1oPlpqq for current coverage and http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3476 for Morris Newman's overview of the Oakland stadium venue choices. The Oakland Tribune reported on a blossom of real estate activity nourished by expectations for Levi's Stadium, soon to be home to the ex-San-Francisco 49ers: http://bit.ly/1l2SpYi In Other News: A plan to expand San Francisco's Moscone Center, mostly upward along Howard Street, was before the city's Planning Commission on June 5. For details and links to the massive EIR see Curbed SF at http://bit.ly/1oH715k. Minutes of the meeting aren't posted yet but the agenda is at http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=3835 with a note that comments will be accepted until June 16. The SF Business Times describes commercial hopes for the plan at http://bit.ly/1n350NX. The official expansion site is at http://mosconeexpansion.com/. Local real estate blog Socketsite has renderings and comments on an alternative at http://bit.ly/1pePumX. The Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, which has roots in the 40-year-old conflict over demolitions at the site, posted criticisms at http://bit.ly/1s2753s, including an argument that the plan did too little for existing pedestrian safety and sidewalk crowding. Developer Larry Kelley announced a deal to buy and clean up the 240-acre Union Pacific rail yard in downtown Sacramento. The Sacramento Bee reported State Sen. Darrell Steinberg and U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui helped negotiate a deal on toxic cleanup responsibilities among Kelley's Downtown Railyard Venture LLC, Union Pacific as the last active industrial owner, and Inland American Real Estate Trust, which became the owner through a loan default by the immediately prior owner, developer Thomas Enterprises. See http://bit.ly/1oPuvnd for details. The California Supreme Court upheld the use of red-light cameras in traffic prosecutions, saying photos taken by automatic cameras weren't hearsay. Ars Technica has a thorough review of California and nationwide law and controversy on the question at http://bit.ly/TDbGtD. - In May the LA City Council approved a pedestrian bridge between elements of the "Da Vinci" downtown housing development, after criticisms of statements from its proponent, G.H. Palmer Associates, that suggested the bridge's purpose was to separate project residents from homeless people in the neighborhood. http://lat.ms/1jDC1N9 The LA Times reported on renewed neighborhood concerns about "mansionization" in homebuilding as the upper strata of the economy improve: http://lat.ms/1qlF7ey Further to LA planning woes, the City Council agreed to pay $1.75 million in legal fees to the challengers who beat the new Hollywood zoning plan: http://lat.ms/1nv3hmh Courthouse News reports that Kings and Kern Counties, the city of Bakersfield, and three other parties have filed challenges to the EIR on the Fresno to Bakersfield leg of the California high-speed rail plan: http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/06/09/68553.htm

The California First District has issued a publication order for its April opinion allowing a 167-acre Potrero Hills Landfill expansion to go forward on the grounds that a reduced alternative was not "economically feasible." In SPRAWLDEF v. San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission , the appeals court overruled a Solano County judge to find local agencies properly approved the full-scale project. The plan, by Waste Connections, Inc., called for moving Spring Branch, an intermittent watercourse in the "secondary management" grassland area of Suisun Marsh. At issue was whether the expansion had to reduce effects on the existing watercourse, or whether it could move Spring Branch to create greater economies of scale from a larger project. Appeal was from a decision by the San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission (BCDC) because that agency administers the Suisun Marsh Preservation Act, and from a decision by Solano County with respect to local protective planning rules. The Army Corps of Engineers had also reviewed and approved the project. The opinion, by Justice Kathleen Banke, joined by Justice Sandra Marguiles and Justice Pro Tem Diana Becton, interpreted the Suisun Marsh Preservation Act as allowing application of CEQA case law on the concept of a "feasible alternative," hence decided the matter essentially as a CEQA case. In walking through CEQA cases on "feasibility," the court identified the landfill case as comparable to Sierra Club v. County of Napa (2004) 121 Cal.App.4th 1490 in that clear evidence was provided to compare projects' preferred and alternate versions. It highlighted evidence that the smaller landfill alternative, compared to the full-scale project, "would result in a 30 percent reduction in capacity and a 45 percent reduction in revenue." A widely shared analysis by Deborah Rosenthal of Sheppard Mullin has noted that the court accepted the developer's own cost comparisons and gave close attention to their details as the basis for the decision: http://bit.ly/1n2Jqcs Pending since 2003, the landfill proposal has been through multiple environmental reviews, including one in 2009 that considered 20 different alternative plans. Initial legal challenges were brought under the heading "Protect the Marsh" but more recently by another group, SPRAWLDEF. David Tam, cofounder of SPRAWLDEF, is mentioned as a petitioner in the matter from the start. Links: The case is at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A137619.PDF The docket reflects the publication order, a currently pending request for correction/modification, and a petition for review: http://bit.ly/1qkcs9D Sierra Club on environmental concerns and some procedural history of challenges to the landfill, 2007: http://sfbay.sierraclub.org/yodeler/html/2007/03/conservation8.htm BCDC Scientific Panel Review of landfill expansion, 2007: http://www.bcdc.ca.gov/planning/potrero/proposed_potrero_hills_11.shtml Northern California Recycling Association collecting 2012 accounts of a prior stage in the challenge, including one account by petitioner David Tam: http://ncrarecycles.org/NNHotOffThePress2012_12 SPRAWLDEF: http://sprawldef.org/about_us/history__mission_statement Potrero Hills Landfill: http://potrerohills.com/ Waste Connections, Inc.: http://www.wasteconnections.com/ BAAQMD Potrero Hills Landfill file: http://www.baaqmd.gov/Divisions/Engineering/Title-V-Permit-Programs/Title-V-Permits/Solano/A2039/Potrero-Hills-Landfill-Inc.aspx A blog-post with links by two editors of a recent UC Press collection on negotiated environmental management in this natural-looking but heavily reshaped ecosystem: http://californiawaterblog.com/2014/05/01/planning-for-the-inevitable-at-suisun-marsh/

California's Supreme Court heard oral arguments May 28 in Tuolumne Jobs & Small Business Alliance v. Superior Court , preparing to resolve a split between state appellate courts on when a developer's use of the ballot initiative petition process has demonstrated sufficient voter suport to substitute for CEQA review. The case most directly concerns a proposed Wal-Mart expansion in the Tuolumne County town of Sonora. The outcome could have statewide effects on a tactic allegedly used by Wal-Mart in several towns: qualifying a ballot measure for a costly special election as a way to pressure local officials into approving projects. Under Cal. Elections Code Sec. 9214, if 15% of a city's voters sign an initiative petition, the governing legislative body must either "adopt the ordinance, without alteration" or place it on the ballot. In 2010, proponents of the Sonora Wal-Mart expansion qualified an initiative for the ballot supporting a specific plan to authorize the project. The Council chose to adopt the text of the initiative as law rather than send it to a vote. In dispute was whether that decision required CEQA review. The San Francisco Daily Journal reported the high court "appeared skeptical of arguments" supporting the prior ruling, by the Fifth District Court of Appeal, that CEQA review was still required after the Sonora council adopted the petition. The petitioners, Tuolumne Jobs & Small Business Alliance (TJSBA), wrote in their final brief to the high court that the "ploy" in Sonora of Walmart and its proponent James Grinnell "appears to be part of a larger statewide strategy to force financially downtrodden communities into approving their development projects without CEQA compliance, without discretionary review, and without an election by presenting approving the Initiatives as the lesser of two evils." Accordingly TJSBA argued public policy should not allow CEQA review to be replaced by a presentation of 15% of a town's registered voters' signatures plus the sympathy of a local legislative body. The "statewide strategy" claim in TJSBA's brief cited to a broken SFGate link, but apparently referred to a report by Will Evans of the investigative news project California Watch, published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. Evans' report suggested Walmart had been whipsawing local governments by gathering signatures to pressure them into either approving a project verbatim as proposed, without CEQA review, or spending public funds on a special election. See http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Walmart-wins-big-with-California-initiatives-2291127.php. The last pre-hearing brief by Wal-Mart's attorneys in the matter, of K&L Gates in San Francisco, accused TJSBA of "completely" ignoring legislative histories of the initiative process and of CEQA, and of using public policy arguments to distract from harm threatened by the Fifth District's position to the core functions of the initiative process and the core First Amendment rights of the voters who signed initiative petitions. Grinnell's counsel complained further of "the use of an irrelevant newspaper article to somehow impune (sic) the motives of the Initiative proponent and the voters who signed the Initiative petition." Wal-Mart's and Grinnell's briefs argued that authority descending from Associated Homebuilders, Inc. v. City of Livermore (1976) 18 Cal. 3d 582 established that once a proponent obtained a 15% signature tally for an intiative proposal, CEQA review requirements no longer applied to it. They argued this shut-out was constitutionally necessary to avoid second-guessing the wishes of the petition signers. The Fifth District court, in its 2012 opinion, had called for more substantial review than a 15% voter approval: either a CEQA process or an election. That opinion, by Justice Rebecca Wiseman with concurrences by Presiding Justice Brad R. Hill and by Justice Stephen J. Kane, warned: "Developers' strategy of obtaining project approvals without environmental review and without elections threatens both to defeat CEQA's important statutory objectives and to subvert the constitutional goals of the initiative process." According to the Fifth District, the Sonora council was already considering an EIR for the Wal-Mart expansion, but put the approval vote on hold to consider the ballot measure, and having adopted the ballot measure it did not approve the EIR. The Fifth District would have sent the matter back to the city for further environmental review. (Evans' article viewing the Fifth District's Sonora decision as a setback for Wal-Mart's statewide strategy is at http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/win-environmental-law-loss-wal-mart-18670.) The Fourth District's 2004 opinion, by Justices Rylaarsdam, O'Leary and Fybel, had taken a directly contrary position in Native American Sacred Site & Environmental Protection Assn. v. City of San Juan Capistrano (2004) 120 Cal.App.4th 961. (See CP&DR's summary at http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-547.) That decision treated the role of a city council, once presented with a qualified voters' petition, as merely ministerial -- a mandatory, automatic function, hence CEQA-exempt. The Fifth District opinion asked how that could be so if the council still held the power to choose between adopting the measure or placing it on the ballot. But the Fourth District opinion had asked how the council's function could be other than ministerial if the wishes of the petition signers were to be respected. (The Burke, Williams & Sorensen firm in 2013 posted an analysis on the conflict of authority as it stood after the Fifth District decision at http://bit.ly/UlWsKa. William Abbott of Abbott & Kindermann analyzed the case for CP&DR at http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3298.) The Fifth District opinion interpreted a prior State Supreme Court case, Friends of Sierra Madre v. City of Sierra Madre , (2001) 25 Cal.4th 165, together with CEQA Guidelines Sec. 15378(b), as saying a referendum initiated by a petition -- as opposed to one initiated by a public agency -- could be a way past the trouble and expense of an EIR process under CEQA. Thence it took the backhanded implication that a petition without an election was not sufficient to substitute for the administrative review process. Grinnell's final reply brief argued on the contrary that the Sierra Madre case addressed only the need for CEQA review of a city council's decision to place its own measure on a ballot. It argued the authority of a city council was not comparable to the reserved power of "the people" to "tear through the exasperating tangle of the traditional legislative procedure and strike directly towards the desired end" by bringing an initiative. And in such a case, it argued, the council acted only as "the ministerial agent of the electorate." TSJBA argued, "The results of an election represent the will of the people. A petition signed by 15 percent of the voters does not." Grinnell answered that the reserved initiative power "is not only manifest when an election is held," but also is manifested in "the right to have a duly-qualified, voter-sponsored initiative immediately passed by the local agency". The parties' papers concluded with project proponents exalting the rights of petition signers to be heard and project opponents presenting CEQA as a shield for city councils against corporate bullying. The California Supreme Court docket for the case is at http://bit.ly/Um828m. The prior Fifth District decision is at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/revpub/F063849.PDF. Links to full texts of briefs to the California Supreme Court are at http://www.courts.ca.gov/25993.htm.

Clearlake posts General Plan revision for review The draft EIR to update Clearlake's 1983 General Plan is up for review. Prepared by a team at Cal Poly, the draft runs to almost 500 pages. A local news report at http://bit.ly/1kkSbRP describes the plan as preparing for population growth from the present through 2040. The plan also seeks to "Protect the City's rural character and maintain the small town atmosphere." The plan seeks to improve affordable housing, "streamline" permits, promote infill, and focus development in eight separate "key growth areas" ranging from the aging Lakeshore Drive business district to a public facilities complex to a commercial strip with a Wal-Mart. More specific goals include "targets" of nearly doubling jobs, from 2,675 in 2010 to 5,744 in 2040, but increasing housing less, from 8,035 units in 2010 to 8,486 in 2040. Subjects of expressed concern include correct handling of stormwater, preservation of agricultural land, the future of Clear Lake, and preservation of fragile local species, whose poetic names cover eight pages, from the bent-flowered fiddleneck, Amsinckia lunaris , to the American badger, Taxidea taxus . Historical resources cover a timespan of some 8000 years, beginning with ancient artifacts found at Borax Lake, and including the early-20th-century "Cobblestone Building", but the city itself is described as not having designated any historical resources. A comment period that has had several announced end dates is now shown on the city Web site as expiring June 30. Plan documents are available at http://bit.ly/1iNSejM. AB 32 scoping plan gentler than courts on GHG cuts? There's a smart CEQA question from the environmental firm of Stoel Rives on its weblog at http://bit.ly/1hxBDWz -- in the new AB 32 scoping plan update, are the envisioned cuts to greenhouse gases (GHG) as deep as those endorsed by California courts? The authors of the item, Thomas Henry and Bao Vu, suggest the update's figures effectively call for a 16% reduction in GHG below "business as usual", which is less than called for by a recent unpublished appellate court analysis. The March 20 CEQA decision on Newhall Ranch, Center for Biological Diversity v. Department of Fish & Wildlife , includes an intricate discussion of GHG requirements in Section IV(G). Although this section of the opinion was excluded from publication, Henry and Vu found it helpful as a guide to prior published authority on the matter. It reviewed the analysis of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which worked back from the AB 32 goal of returning GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and concluded that the proper reduction in emissions would have to be 30% below "business as usual" levels otherwise projected for 2020. So the lawyers ask in their analysis, if a project "only" reduces GHG by 16% in alignment with the terms of the new scoping plan, might it be environmentally careful enough to satisfy a court's CEQA review? The Newhall Ranch case is at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B245131.PDF. Section IV(G) starts at Page 92 of the PDF. For context on that case see http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3461. The AB 32 scoping plan update (9.7 MB download) is at http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/scopingplan/2013_update/first_update_climate_change_scoping_plan.pdf. Kern County settles disputes over tax apportionment Two tax revenue apportionment disputes cutting in opposite directions appear to have settled this spring. Most recently, Kern County claimed back $882,000 from the city of Ridgecrest based on an overpayment of tax increment funds that were no longer due to the city because of Redevelopment's dissolution. See www.ridgecrestca.com/article/20140519/NEWS/140519677 on the error. Per http://www.ridgecrestca.com/article/20140523/NEWS/140529827 the parties reached a settlement allowing the city to pay the money back over three years. Back in March, the county agreed to pay Bakersfield $713,000 in recalculated tax revenue. That payment settled a city-county lawsuit over the county Auditor-Controller's decision to reverse tax sharing agreements for areas annexed to the city since 2005. See http://bit.ly/1naQsNP and links from there. McKinley Village opponents file suit Opponents of the McKinley Village subdivision appealed the Sacramento City Council's approval vote with a lawsuit May 30 based on alleged CEQA and zoning law violations. The project, led by former California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, is on an isolated parcel between a rail line and a freeway in east Sacramento. The opponents' writ petition says "up to 40 trains per day pass the site," it's next to a 172-acre landfill, and the project isn't proper infill but "consists of wedging a residential complex into a corner of the City that is utterly inappropriate for that use." There has been extensive talk of pedestrian and vehicle underpasses to improve access in and out of the proposed site but it's not clear which will be built or who will pay for them. See http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/30/6445702/foes-of-mckinley-village-file.html and links from there. The new lawsuit is East Sacramento Partnerships for a Livable City v. City of Sacramento , Sacramento Superior Court case No. 34-2014-80001851. Court documents will be available free online in the case until Sacramento's county court download fees take effect July 1. More time to comment on BDCP State and federal sponsors of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) granted an extension sought by environmental groups of time to comment on the massive Delta water tunnel project. The new deadline is July 29, 2014. In the same May 30 announcement as the time extension, the agencies released a draft implementing agreement for the plan, out for review by the same deadline as the whole. See http://bit.ly/1outEYX for the press release. Maven's Notebook collected reactions at http://bit.ly/1naJzMH from the Metropolitan Water District (favorable), Restore the Delta (indignant), and the State Water Contractors (anxious to start the dig). The Stockton Record 's Alex Breitler has more details, plus highlights of the new proposed agreement text, at http://bit.ly/1jPmXwf. Also in late May, the Governor named Karla Nemeth, the BDCP project manager at the California Natural Resources Agency, to serve as deputy secretary for water policy at the agency, per the Central Valley Business Times at http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=25946. New curtailment orders on junior water rights Seniority in California water claims is starting to be enforced in more than theory, and the sheer oddness of the state's water rights system is becoming a far worse than theoretical problem for serious numbers of people. As affected parties are no doubt aware, more curtailment orders came down Friday, May 30. The Stockton Record's Breitler says 1,634 junior water rights holders are affected in the San Joaquin basin (see http://bit.ly/1iR0Ndy). There are now orders in effect in the Scott, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Russian rivers' watersheds. For the main state site with orders see http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/drought/water_availability.shtml. Meanwhile, the Center for Investigative Reporting found many agricultural water districts aren't complying with current requirements to track water usage per farmer: http://bit.ly/1kB6gtr. An AP report found the state's water system is simply not set up to keep accurate track of water usage by holders of pre-1914 water rights who are entitled to unlimited flow: http://bit.ly/1mPAl6M The San Francisco Examiner has even reported that San Francisco's seemingly enduring claim on the Tuolumne River's flow from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite is based on a water right that is junior to the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts -- and if they assert their full rights, San Francisco's entitlement could work out to "the beer foam out of a beer mug." See http://bit.ly/SrlplX. Sacramento officials trying for Tesla factory Sacramento officials have stepped into competition with other areas' municipal boosters in a competition to land Tesla's planned "Gigafactory" battery plant. The Sacramento-area site would be Mather Commerce Park, a business park near the airport. A detailed Sacramento Bee writeup at http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/22/6425105/sacramentos-mather-airport-in.html among other things laments the loss of redevelopment funds as a means of offering tax advantages to the company. The Silicon Valley Business Journal reports developers are active around the existing Tesla plant site in Fremont. Lennar is reportedly about to buy a 112-acre parcel from Union Pacific on Highway 880 with plans to build a residential and commercial complex including a school, and Toll Brothers is working on 34 acres next to the new BART station. See http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/06/02/lennar-buying-100-acres-from-union-pacific-as.html. Judge blocks Riverside-Figueroa "Landbridge" plan A June 2 hearing before an unsympathetic judge may have ended an attempt to preserve the Riverside-Figueroa Bridge over the LA River for reuse on the model of New York's "High Line". A campaign led by nonprofit Enrich LA and architects RAC Design Build had sought to turn the 1927 structure into a "Landbridge" bike and pedestrian amenity. But per an indignant account from LA Streetsblog , Judge James Chalfant treated the effort as coming too late in a planning process that had already arranged to demolish the bridge, and refused to grant an injunction sought by the would-be renovators. Landbridge proponents and the city disputed whether retaining the old bridge would truly interfere with planned further construction along the LA River, since the bridge's replacement was already completed and operating at a separate site upstream. The LA Times reported Deputy City Attorney Mary Decker "estimated that delaying the demolition would cost $18,000 a day starting next Monday." According to the paper, Landbridge proponents said they took formal action so late in the planning process because they only realized belatedly that the new bridge would not be built on the same site as the old one. See http://bit.ly/SsgZey for Streetsblog and http://lat.ms/1jNj0s3 for the LA Times report. Can George Lucas do more with Pier 30 than Warriors? San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has reportedly offered George Lucas the Seawall Lot 330 site for his magnificently funded but currently homeless "Cultural Arts Museum" proposal. The site is just inland across the Embarcadero from Pier 30 and forms part of the area the Golden State Warriors would have developed if they had built an arena on Piers 30 and 32. With the Warriors now contracted for a waterfront site farther south, and mixed-use development at Piers 30-32 already enabled by Assemblymember Phil Ting's AB 1273 (see http://bit.ly/1tGZdQw), it's a live question what may move into the political and legal vacuum. Lucas has been seeking a home for his project since the Presidio Trust refused to let him build it on Crissy Field near the Golden Gate Bridge. And while the Presidio site didn't work, Lucas' talk of spending $300 to $400 million up front, and providing another $400 million endowment at his death, has held the interest of a city government whose entire proposed public budget (see http://sfcontroller.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=5395) is a little below $8.6 billion. For details see the writeup and links on Socketsite , which asks if maybe Lucas could add some housing to the mix: http://bit.ly/1o8K1My Any such proposal could be affected by San Francisco's Measure B, which appeared to have won in the June 3 election, and which calls for a public vote on any future waterfront height limit variance. However, Socketsite notes the ex-Warriors site is already zoned for a solid 65-foot structure with towers possibly up to 105 feet. Elsewhere in San Francisco news, Mayor Lee included in his budget a proposed fund of $2.48 million in combined city and federal money to renovate 172 vacant units of public housing so homeless families can live in them. The plan has been championed by Supervisor London Breed. See http://bit.ly/1kpiWEB. And in the first days of June, as Muni transit drivers staged a disruptive sickout, a city Transportation Task Force report found San Francisco was behind on transportation infrastructure and in need of some $10.1 billion in improvements through 2030. (See Socketsite writeup at http://bit.ly/1hynNmT and the report itself at http://bit.ly/1hUkOop.) During the sickout, Gawker 's Kevin Montgomery reported, many buses and trains were delayed but Muni stayed on time with the 83X, known as the Twitterbus, which connects the Caltrain at Fourth and Townsend to Twitter headquarters at Tenth and Market. http://bit.ly/1uhcvW4

The Fifth District Court of Appeal last week rejected an EIR on air quality grounds for a senior-oriented housing complex near Friant Dam. The methodical, linguistically attentive opinion by Justice Donald R. Franson, Jr. toured three realms of environmental review: land, water and air. It turned down objections from environmental and community groups based in the law of land zoning and water impacts, leaning hard on some word definitions to do so. But when it examined the project's mitigation measures in the air, it found the EIR had failed to put foundations under them. The appellate court sent the decision back to Fresno County's local judge with instructions to have the county describe more specifically what harm might be done by the project's extra air pollution, such as vehicle exhaust, and how the harm would be mitigated in ways the county could measure and enforce. According to the decision text, the project by Friant Ranch, L.P. would cover about a square mile and a half, mainly of former grazing land. The court says it would build some 2500 housing units, some of them restricted to adults 55 and older. Media reports put the total of units at 2,270. By the court's description the project additionally calls for 250,000 square feet of commercial use and it would all be on 942 acres counting 460 acres of dedicated open space. That sounds large but it was the project's Alternative 3, smaller than some earlier projections. As clarified on the docket at http://bit.ly/1iN6hpI the case was brought by the Sierra Club, Revive the San Joaquin and the League of Women Voters of Fresno against the county and Friant Ranch LP. A related suit brought by the City of Fresno moved toward settlement in March with an agreement that the developer would charge a $500 fee for each unit to contribute toward a parks fund. See http://bit.ly/1h1q35r and http://bit.ly/1pNq2SC. Opponents of the Friant Ranch project greeted the May 27 decision with a victory press conference emphasizing opposition to sprawl and concern over "diverting our already scarce resources to new-town development": http://bit.ly/1mLgDZL. But the developer's counsel told local news station KFSN that the dispute wasn't over and the project's proponents still counted on going forward with it: http://abc30.tv/1iNaREi. The matter on appeal was a county Supervisors' approval that updated the Friant Community Plan within the Fresno County General Plan, authorized a specific plan for the project, and amended the Friant Redevelopment Plan. The court found the land element of the proposal was acceptable because the County properly, though controversially, amended the county general plan to change the area's land use designation: from mainly agriculture plus a few other uses, mainly trailer parks, to the commercial, residential and public uses that the project had in mind. The decision walked through a word-by-word dispute on whether the land use change for the area matched the county's policy to "maintain agriculturally-designated areas for agricultural use" and to "direct urban growth away from valuable agricultural lands to cities, unincorporated communities, and other areas planned for such development where public facilities and infrastructure are available." It quoted the EIR as finding that the land lost to agriculture was neither prime, nor of statewide importance, nor designated as unique, nor subject to preservation contracts, hence that it was not not "valuable agricultural lands" as defined in the policy. The EIR language had quietly extended the phrase about "public facilities and infrastructure" to include areas where facilities "are available or can be expanded." Plaintiffs objected that the last four words were not in the regulation. But the court chose not to view their appearance in the EIR as impermissible mission creep, in light of an additional policy that discussed installing infrastructure prospectively. The court found that plaintiffs' objections about traffic congestion under the General Plan's transportation element were not exhausted administratively. Plaintiffs had argued the issues were raised sufficiently at the administrative stage of review by a six-paragraph section in a critical letter by Fresno's city manager. The court quoted the letter as citing projections for "unacceptable levels of service" through crowding on two major roads reaching the project site, and as expressing polite skepticism over the EIR's claim that emergency services would not thereby be affected. But the court rejected those phrases as not placing the county sufficiently on notice of the issues because they didn't mention the problem's relation to the general plan nor the county's LOS Policy -- "in contrast to" other parts of the letter that were more specific in describing standards and stating whether they were met. As to the law of water -- CEQA review of wastewater disposal provisions, that is -- the court rejected plaintiffs' objections because it found wastewater treatment and disposal were adequately addressed, primarily through a plan to build a new wastewater facility, create an effluent pond in a former gravel quarry, and use treated wastewater for summertime irrigation, principally at the project itself. The court found inconsistencies in the EIR on the effluent pond's dimensions but worked past them and accepted evidence presented that effluent stored or used locally for irrigation either would not reach the San Joaquin River, or, if it did, would not harm it. It found the EIR presented sufficient detail overall on the volume of wastewater and its disposition -- especially after setting aside discussions of larger wastewater volumes that would have been called for by larger, unapproved versions of the project. The court rejected complaints that the draft and final EIRs gave too little attention to the hydrogeology of the proposed quarry pond (an issue that the Sierra Club was still reportedly disputing two weeks ago). In doing so, the court distinguished its own 1994 ruling in San Joaquin Raptor/Wildlife Rescue Center v. County of Stanislaus , 27 Cal.App.4th 713, saying that, when it found the draft EIR inadequate in that earlier case, it "did not establish new rules of law heightening the disclosure required in a draft EIR or preventing a final EIR from curing a draft EIR's omission of information." Regardless, the court said that in the 1994 case the final EIR was also deficient and "Our holding referred to the final EIR, not the draft." Further, it said the Friant Ranch draft EIR was more specific than the 1994 document to begin with, and then evidence from competing experts had further filled out the administrative record. Turning to air quality analysis under CEQA, the court said the EIR provided more detail than the one previously found deficient in Bakersfield Citizens for Local Control v. City of Bakersfield (2004) 124 Cal.App.4th 1184 but it was still "short on analysis." It said the Friant Ranch EIR failed sufficiently to connect the dots from the county's existing serious air pollution problems, to the volume of pollution likely to be added by traffic to the new project, to the likely specific effects of those emissions, such as health detriments or days when local air quality standards would not be attained. It found this problem had been sufficiently raised in administrative proceedings because the City of Fresno's objecting letter said the EIR had failed to "disclose the human health related effects of the Project's air pollution impacts." The court's toughest assessment was of a "mitigation measure" that was actually a list of approaches such as saving energy and encouraging bicycle use. In the nonresidential development areas, the EIR offered mitigations including shade trees in paved areas and catalyst-equipped HVAC systems in the buildings. The list came with an assurance that the mitigations would reduce pollution "substantially". The court said the EIR was not at fault for failing to explain more carefully how or how much the listed mitigation measures would help, though saying it shouldn't claim pollution reductions would be "substantial" without giving evidence to back up the claim. On the other hand, the court did insist that the actions to be taken needed to be spelled out somehow: either the EIR should give specific descriptions up front of promised actions whose performance the county could enforce at need, or if it called for "deferred formulation of mitigation", it should provide "specific performance criteria" for designing such measures later. The decision said neither was the case for many of the mitigation measures proposed, and that use of a hedging phrase, "where feasible and appropriate", was not reassuring, but only "add to the vagueness". (This central part of the ruling was reminiscent of the recent Woodland case, though it's not cited. See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3472). The court found the county did adequately consider whether compensation through off-site emission reduction programs might help, in that it said the possibility was going to be considered during the air district's Indirect Source Review. For full approval, the project would need to be approved by regional water and air quality boards as well as the county. The case is at http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/F066798.PDF.

It's easier at this point in the legislative season to say which bills are dead than which ones have a chance. This is a quick rundown of bills we've been following, plus a few more. For descriptive notes on many of the bills' provisions see our prior discussion at http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3498 and as linked from there. Cap and Trade seems to be in high-level horse-trading mode. Only Jerry Brown, State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, and the legislative leadership know for sure how this one will end. The latest iteration of Steinberg's legislative proposal appeared June 3 in a Senate budget committee hearing at http://sbud.senate.ca.gov/sites/sbud.senate.ca.gov/files/FullC/June032014SBFRCapandTradeAgenda.pdf. Comparison with the original April version, available at California Association of Councils of Government (CALCOG) site at http://www.calcog.org/index.aspx?nid=96, shows the Steinberg proposal has given some ground, dropping from 40% to 20% the portion of cap and trade proceeds that would go to "affordable housing and sustainable communities", and within that dropping the percentage for affordable housing from Steinberg's original 20% down to 10%. See http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3494 for the main starting points of proposals in that area, which have been the subject of many hopes for transportation and housing funding this session.  Bills that are now procedurally dead include: SB 1132, fracking limits. SB 1260, housing set-aside in post-redevelopment tax increment financing AB 2175, renters' rebates AB 2729, Infrastructure Financing Bank expansion SB 391, raise funds for affordable housing with real estate recording fees SB 1270, limits on surface mining SB 1451, raising procedural bars for would-be CEQA litigants, is also done for this year, having failed to pass out of its house of origin. Next year's CEQA sequel has already begun: staffers with the State Senate Environmental Quality and Judiciary Committees are circulating a survey to "stakeholders" on the issue. It asks broad open-ended questions on how best to revise the CEQA environmental process and seeks responses before next September 1. The attached copy was provided by a recipient of the emailed letter. The following remained live bills after the May 30 "house of origin" deadline: SB 1439, Ellis Act restrictions, was turned down in the State Senate on the Wednesday before Friday's deadline but then won approval on reconsideration in a dramatic Thursday lobbying push. There's an insider blow-by-blow account by San Francisco's Randy Shaw at http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=12670. AB 2372, limited Prop 13 reform on business reassessments, "was modified enough to gain support" by the CA Chamber of Commerce and passed into the Senate, per the Sacramento Bee at http://bit.ly/1kyv05I. See also SF's smart Socketsite blog at http://bit.ly/1hx4TNl. SB 1021, limited parcel tax rate variability AB 1537, change Marin County's status from "urban" to "suburban" to downzone default housing density from 30 to 20 units per acre. Lots of critical comment is around on this one, including Planetizen with links to Marin IJ coverage at http://www.planetizen.com/articles/node-69031 and a critique from attorney and climate/transit scholar Ethan Elkind suggesting the measure could be a corrosive precedent against the enforceability of housing elements: http://www.ethanelkind.com/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-californias-affordable-housing-requirements/ SB 968, public access to Martin's Beach; recent coverage in the San Mateo Daily Journal at http://bit.ly/Sr6k3Z . SB 1424, City of Martinez tidelands transfer. See http://martinezgazette.com/archives/13910, and an exceptionally detailed legislative summary on history behind control of the Martinez marina via http://bit.ly/1kAWOqahttp://basecamp.com/ SB 2135, affordable housing priority for surplus public land. AB 2104, overriding HOA landscaping rules to save water, shown at http://bit.ly/1knvkVP as calendared for a June 10 State Senate hearing. SB 270, ban single-use carryout bags AB 2493, post-Redevelopment release of $750 million in project funds to cities. SB 1129, post-Redevelopment cleanup AB 2280, re-create some elements of Redevelopment with a housing emphasis AB 1404, allow and require San Francisco Redevelopment's successor agency to rebuild over 5000 affordable housing units lost to the city through "urban renewal" demolitions 1955-1975 AB 2292, expand infrastructure financing districts specifically for Oakland freight and ex-military sites that are already redevelopment targets. AB 2549, local commission on Milpitas' post-Redevelopment funding losses. AB 2417, for "purple pipe" distribution of recycled water AB 1739/SB1168, groundwater management: see http://www.acwa.com/news/water-news/groundwater-bills-move-forward-legislature. AB 2453, Paso Robles water district governance by a locally controversial "hybrid" board structure: see http://pasoroblesdailynews.com/state-assembly-passes-bill-permit-paso-robles-water-basin-district/21199/ SB 1077, pilot program imposing auto tax based on miles traveled SB 69/AB 1521, restore Vehicle License Fee revenue for newly created municipalities such as Jurupa Valley. AB 1513, Residential property: possession by declaration AB 1999, state historic rehabilitation tax credit AB 2145, new rules on community choice aggregation for clean electrical power: opponents' site with many municipal endorsers at http://www.no2145.org/; IBEW union argument in favor: http://bit.ly/1rIUTEB ; State legislative site, which links to recent floor analyses, at http://bit.ly/1p5rUqk SB 1199, designate almost 37 miles of the Mokelumne River as "wild and scenic": http://on.news10.net/1iQE0ym Floor analyses available via http://bit.ly/1l3Dfq7 show long lists of endorsers for and against.