Reversing an appellate court decision, the California Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that courts should substitute their “abstract” judgment for the lead agency’s judgment as to what constitutes a “new” project that requires more extensive environmental analysis. The ruling appears to clear up a conflict between appellate rulings from different districts. But the plaintiffs said they still believe they can win the case on remand. The case involved a proposed building program at College of San Mateo, a community college located in the City of San Mateo, that would have involved demolishing some buildings and renovating others. Initially, the college certified a mitigated negative declaration for the building program. Years later, however, the college changed the building program so that some buildings that would have been demolished would be renovated, while the Horticulture Building, which wraps around a horticultural garden, would be demolished. Concluding that the change did not constitute a “new project” under the California Environmental Quality Act, the college issued an addendum to the MND. A group of residents and students calling themselves Friends of the College of San Mateo Gardens sued and won in both San Mateo County Superior Court and the First District Court of Appeal. But in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court reversed the First District. “When an agency proposes changes to a previously approved project, CEQA does not authorize courts to invalidate the agency’s action based solely on their own abstract evaluation of whether the agency’s proposal is a new project, rather than a modified version of the old one,” wrote Justice Leondra Kruger in an exceptionally clear and well-written argument. “… An agency that proposes project changes … must determine whether the previous environmental documents retains any relevance in light of the proposed changes and, if so, whether major revisions to the previous environmental document are nevertheless required due to the involvement of new, previously unstudied significant environmental impacts. These are determinations for the agency to make in the first instance, subject to judicial review for substantial evidence.” That was the important legal ruling, and it was pretty clear. Sabrina Teller, a lawyer, for Remy Moose & Manley who argued the case for the college, told SFGate : “The court is still urging a deferential standard.” However, Kruger acknowledged that the case before the Supreme Court did not address all issues in the case – including the question of the legal validity of the CEQA Guidelines sections that allow an MND addendum on a modified project rather than an environmental impact report. That’s one reason why the plaintiffs say they are confident of victory on remand. Susan Brandt-Hawley, lawyer for the plaintiff, said she is still hopeful that the lower courts will distinguish the original and revised project in such a way that her client will win. “Here we have an addendum to a neg dec, and the neg dec was for a preservation project. And the new addendum (actually therefore a revised neg dec) is for a demolition project,” she said in an email to CP&DR. The controversy in the case revolves around so-called “Building 20,” the college’s horticulture building and an adjacent garden that students and nearby residents value for its peacefulness. In 2006, the college adopted a building program that called for retention of Building 20 and demolition of other buildings on campus. The college also certified an MND for the project. Five years later, however, the college changed the building program, calling for renovation of the other buildings and demolition of Building 20 and the garden, along with replanting some of the herbs and bushes in the garden elsewhere on campus. The Friends group sued. In an unpublished opinion three years ago, the First District Court of Appeal ruled against the college, concluding that as a matter of law the 2011 building program was a new project rather than a modified project. The First District relied heavily on Save Our Neighborhood v. Lishman (2006), 140 Cal.App.4 th 1288. In that case, the Third District concluded that the question of a new or modified project was a “threshold question of law”. The following year, the Second District issued a somewhat conflicting ruling in Mani Brothers Real Estate Group v. City of Los Angeles (2007), 153 Cal.App.4 th 1385. In that case, the court found that a 3.3-million-square-foot project was a modification of a 2.7-million-square-foot project on which the city had done an EIR 15 years before. The Second District criticized Save Our Neighborhood , saying it undermined judicial deference of agency decisions. The appellate court in the College of San Mateo case acknowledged this conflict but used the Save Our Neighborhood reasoning, saying that “it is clear from the record tha tht enature of the project has fundamentally and qualitatively changed to the point where the new proposal is actually a new project altogether.” In her ruling for the Supreme Court, Kruger rejected the Save Our Neighborhoods reasoning put forth by the plaintiffs in this case. She wrote that this approach “would assign to court the authority – indeed, the obligation – to determine whether an agency’s proposal qualifies as a new project, in the absence of any standards to govern the inquiry.” She added: “ o ask whether proposed agency action constitutes a new project, purely in the abstract, misses the reason why the characterization matters in the first place….A decision to proceed under CEQA’S subsequent review provisions must thus necessarily rest on a determination – whether implicit or explicit – that the original environmental document contains some informational value.” The Case: Friends of the College of San Mateo Gardens v. San Mateo County Community College District , S215061 (September 19, 2016) The Lawyers: For Friends: Susan Brandt-Hawley, susanbh@preservationlawyers.com For College: Sabrina Teller, steller@rmmenvirolaw.com

Wal-Mart’s trying hard to be green. And, despite the arguments of a local citizen group in Ceres, one appellate court has concluded that this isn’t a problem under the California Environmental Quality Act. In this case – involving a Wal-Mart in Ceres – the Fifth District Court of Appeal ruled that the mere fact that a project increases the amount of recycling – or includes biodegradable plastic – doesn’t trigger a requirement for environmental analysis in a project’s environmental impact report. A group called Citizens For Ceres challenged the EIR in court on several grounds. The group was represented by Brett Jolley, a Stockton lawyer who often represents citizen groups opposing Wal-Mart projects in the Central Valley. On the recycling question the Fifth District said: “Unlike traditional waste disposal methods, such as landfilling, recycling is not itself an environmental problem, but is instead a solution to the problems presented by those traditional methods.” Therefore, the issues related to recycling are, by definition, not environmental problems. “ e agree with Wal-Mart and the city that when a project will result in increased demand for recycling services, this often can be treated as an economic rather than an environmental impact and need not be analyzed in the EIR.” The case also dealt with some interesting issues involving the economic rationale for a statement of overriding considerations under CEQA, which is required to approve a project in the face of significant impacts. The citizen group had challenged the statement of overriding considerations, saying the project would not generate increased tax revenue and more jobs as the city and Wal-Mart claimed. But the court said the record contained “substantial evidence of probable benefit” and basically said judges don’t have to be economists. In a followup to a previous appellate ruling, the court overruled the trial court and decided that Wal-Mart should not have been barred from recovering the $48,000 cost of preparing the administrative record in the case. The court also rejected the citizen group’s argument that the EIR did not adequately deal with issues associated with possible urban decay, saying that the city had adequately conditioned the project with requirements that Wal-Mart maintain the store it would be abandoning until a new tenant is found. The proposed development project is a 300,000-square-foot retail center known as Mitchell Ranch Center, which would be anchored by a 190,000-square-foot Super Wal-Mart that includes 56,000 square feet for groceries. The non-grocery portion of the store is comparable in size to an existing Wal-Mart in Ceres that would be closed as a result of this project’s construction. The project’s approval process and EIR dragged out for several years and at one point Wal-Mart bought the property from the underlying developer and became the applicant. Citizens For Ceres brought a very wide-ranging legal challenge to the EIR, but both the trial judge and the appellate court ruled in favor of the city and Wal-Mart on all counts. The appellate court’s ruling on the recycling question may be an important precedent. Citizens For Ceres had argued that the city should have assessed the environmental impact of the recycling created by the project because Wal-Mart uses a biodegradable plastic known as polylactic acid, or PLA, in its packaging. Polylactic acid is sometimes known as “corn plastic”. The city documented that its current recycling facilities had more than enough capacity to handle the additional material from the Wal-Mart. But Citizens’ consulting engineer made the following argument about why the city should have done an environmental analysis on the recycling: PLA can compromise other plastic in the waste stream, which can reduce the opportunity to recycle the other materials, which in turn could threaten the city’s ability to meet the state’s AB 939 recycling targets. The city’s response was that PLA is already in Ceres’ waste stream. The city separates PLA out of the waste stream after recycling is picked up and then sends it to the landfill, where it biodegrades, so therefore there is no environmental impact worth analyzing. The Court of Appeal acknowledged that the amount of recyclable waste would go up because of the Wal-Mart project, but concluded: “This is substantial evidence that the project will cause an increase in recycling; but as we have explained, an increase in recycling in itself is not an adverse environmental impact. It is not substantial evidence that the increase may be more than the city’s recycling contractor can handle. For that reason, it does not support a fair argument that there is a significant impact needing discussion in the EIR.” Regarding PLA, the court noted: “Because of the sorting problem (PLA products cannot be recycled with other plastic and must instead be separated and either composted or landfilled), a major increase in PLA waste from a proposed project could conceivably lead to a reduction in recycling and an increase in landfilling.” However, the court concluded: “There is no evidence of this type of problem in this case, however.” The discussion of the statement of overriding consideration could be important as well, because the Court of Appeal concluded that courts don’t have to second-guess a lead agency’s analysis of the economic benefits of a project. Ceres had hired Bay Area Economics to do an economic analysis. BAE found that the project would increase sales tax receipts by $327,000 per year and increase the number of jobs over the current Wal-Mart fom 375 to 580, in large part because of the other stores and restaurants that would be located in the center. Citizens For Ceres challenged all these numbers and BAE’s underlying assumptions. Among other things, Citizens argued that many of the new jobs would be part-time. Indeed, Citizens submitted as evidence a report from the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, released in 2000, on the subject of Wal-Mart and part-time jobs – but the city submitted a letter from the association three years later saying the report was outdated. The appellate justices decided that it was not their job to second-guess an economic analysis: “It is not our role to make a factual finding about whether the project will truly benefit or harm the job market. It is not enough for a challenger to present some evidence opposed to the agency’s findings, for we do not resolve conflicts in the evidence under the substantial evidence standard. The only question is whether the record contains substantial evidence of a probable benefit. It does.” On the question of who should bear the cost of preparing the voluminous administrative record in the case – often an contentious issue in CEQA cases – the court overruled the trial judge and said Wal-Mart could recover the costs. However, the court remanded to the trial court the question of how much cost Wal-Mart could recover. The administrative record was the subject of a previous appellate ruling on the Ceres Wal-Mart -- Citizens for Ceres v. Superior Court (2013) 217 Cal.App.4th 889. In that case, the court ruled that pre-approval communications between the city and Wal-Mart were not privileged, which of course increased the cost of preparing the administrative record. On the urban decay question – a topic of increasing interest in CEQA lawsuits – the appellate court reaffirmed a trend from other cases and narrowed the issue only to the physical deterioriation of vacant stores. The court ruled that a mitigation measure requiring Wal-Mart to beef up maintenance of its old store while it is vacant was sufficient to take the urban decay issue down to a level of insignificance. The court declined to rule more expansively about the likely impact of the new Wal-Mart on a wide range of other stores in the vicinity. The Case: Citizens of Ceres v. City of Ceres , No. F071600, September 12, 2016 The Lawyers: For Citizens for Ceres: Brett Jolley, Shore, McKinley & Conger, bjolley@smcslaw.com For City of Ceres: Edward A. Grutzmacher, Meyers, Nave, Riback, Silver & Wilson, egrutzmacher@meyersnave.com For Wal-Mart: Edward P. Sangster, K & L Gates, ed.sangster@klgates.com

Several of the smallest pieces in the de Young Museum’s extraordinary retrospective of California artist Ed Ruscha depict abnormally vast western landscapes. Thin strips of prairie stretch just above the bottom edge of the frame. Attenuated horizons separate starry skies from a dark continent. Extreme horizontality makes even Ruscha’s tiniest images appear immense, capturing the grandeur and loneliness of Earth and sky. Upon this template, telephone poles recede achingly into a blue-black dusk ( Let’s Keep in Touch ). Two oil derricks stand at attention on opposite sides of a canvas ( Well, well ). Clusters of tiny lights huddle close under a starry sky ( Two Similar Cities ). In America’s Future , an empty horizon at dusk extends forever with every hue between yellow and taupe looming above. These are the pieces that gave the exhibit its title: “Ed Ruscha and the Great American West.” Though Ruscha depicts landscapes, he is not a landscape painter. For him, the western landscape turns into a symbol of itself, representing all the Americanisms – individualism, freedom, expansion, commercialism – that derive from having so much space on our hands. It also gave rise to a particularly type of urbanism, of which Ruscha is a remarkably astute critic. Even Ruscha’s emptiest landscapes are foils for the peculiar type of city that arose in the West. Raised in Nebraska, he migrated to Los Angeles in the 1960s, to discover the beauties and ironies of this corner of America. He looks with bemusement upon the place to which so many Midwesterners escaped. At age 78, he continues to work there. Most of all, Ruscha is to painting what the team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are to architecture. Both were inspired by roadside landscapes of the West and fascinated by signage. Both balance aesthetic appeal with visual and verbal irony. Not coincidentally, humor for both of them comes in the form of unexpected use of text. “The Great American West” traces Ruscha’s interest in unexpectedly diverse subject matter while keeping a firm gaze on the ties that bind his works: from monumental paintings of gas stations, to silhouettes of coyotes, to raw words, to photographs of the entire Sunset Strip. The work of humans -- power poles, warehouses, streets, and, of course, written language -- inhabit every Ruscha image. But humanity is deliberately absent. Buildings are rendered deliberately sterile and ironic, curious interlopers on God’s creation. His Standard Oil stations recede so perfectly into the vanishing point, they look more like architectural renderings than they do actual structures. Ruscha’s trademark words are disembodied too, appearing as if stenciled on to the canvas by God, every bit as inscrutable as the landscape itself. This effect reaches its apotheosis in Ruscha's series of the Hollywood Sign, in which words and landscape really do intersect. Even Ruscha’s photos are vacant. They reveal not architectural beauty but rather its banality. (The de Young, an earnest work of starchitecture by Herzog and de Mueron , is the opposite of all which fascinates Ruscha.) He captures empty of parking lots and backyard pools with undisturbed surfaces. The same goes for his conventional cityscapes and his Sunset Strip photos, which look as evacuated by atomic blast or urgent Sunday sermon. Ruscha’s West is not a place for people. The second room of the exhibit includes pieces from Ruscha’s most deliberately urban series of paintings. Ruscha’s “city” paintings are not paintings of cities at all but rather are works of abstract expressionism that ostensibly refer to Los Angeles. Ruscha depicts the city as a grey plain of static, like an untuned television, interrupted by lines representing streets, with names that mean something only to veteran Angelenos: Oxford, Beverly, Western; Laurel Canyon/Ventura Boulevard; Sunset, Coronado. In Sunset-Gardner Cross, the entire Los Angeles Basin extends up the canvas to meet with a bonfire of yellows, oranges, and reds. His most haunting cityscapes depict Los Angeles from above at night, with beads of light forming straight lines and right angles on the “Plains of Id,” as Reyner Banham called the working-class flats of the Los Angeles basin. His most nonsensical: the words La Brea, Sunset, Orange and De Longpre arrayed in their proper geographic arrangement against the backdrop of what appears to be Mount Everest. Ruscha reduces the city to cartographic signifiers: lines and names. This is the bureaucratic vision, familiar to thoughtful planners, that has sapped so many American cities of their would-be texture, soul, and joy. Those implacable white dots on the prairie connote our cities in their entirety – they signify locations, but they are not places. Ruscha offers a chance for planners to step away from the trappings of bureaucracy and literally envision cities and landscapes in new ways. You cannot think about cities without thinking the landscapes atop and within they sit. Too often the quality of California cities, especially their pedestrian environments, is inversely proportional with the grandeur of landscape. Los Angeles is not warm, and not always humane, because it was not designed to be warm and humane. The sterile, empty, vacuous Los Angeles that Ruscha depicts is a place of our own making. (The lone exception is San Francisco, which Ruscha has not, as far as I know, ever depicted.) Too many planners of past generations approached western cities the way Ruscha does – but without the humor and without the harmlessness of paint and canvas. They created real places that are inhuman and hew more towards commerce and automobiles than to joy and communion. Ruscha’s lines are the placeless thoroughfares down which we drive. Unlike the abstruse, theory-based creations of many of Ruscha's late 20th century contemporaries (particularly abstract expressionists), his images are aesthetically gorgeous, with the precision of a graphic designer, sense of proportion on par with Renaissance masters, and command of color rivaling Mark Rothko. These images deliberately belie what many of our cities are like. Viewing the west through Ruscha’s eyes offers planners to think about the opposite of roadside America: the vibrancy of center cities so often dismissed as “crowds;” the pedestrian environments so ripe for redesign; the public spaces that we forgot to build as we expanded; and, most of all, the zoning laws, street patterns, and real estate typologies that pretend as if we can expand infinitely, all the way to that long horizon. Ed Ruscha and the Great American West On view until October 9, 2016 Tickets $22 De Young Museum San Francisco Catalog 244 pages FAMSF Publication / University of California Press $55 Hardcover All images courtesy of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco .

Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Legislature have moved the goalposts again on climate policy, meaning the state’s metropolitan planning organizations and local governments are going to have to go into stretch mode again in focusing land use policies and transportation investments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Furthermore, the pressure on the MPOs and the local governments will depend on lot on whether California retains the embattled cap-and-trade program or ditches it. No cap-and-trade will almost certainly mean bigger targets in the MPOs’ sustainable communities programs. In early September, Brown signed two climate change bills: SB 32 , the long-awaited successor to AB 32, and AB 197 . The first bill will put a lot of pressure on the regional sustainable communities strategies by essentially doubling the GHG emissions reduction target between 2020 and 2030. The second is designed to protect low-income communities from bearing too much of the brunt of the cap-and-trade program – meaning the bill could alter or threaten the cap-and-trade program altogether. Up to now, the state’s SCSs have been focused on AB 32’s target of reducing GHGs back to 1990 levels by 2020 – approximately a 20% reduction. And the evidence is that this effort is actually working. The ARB recently reported that the state’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions dropped from 484 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMTC02e) in 2007 to 441 MMTC02e in 2014. The 2020 target is 431 MMTC02e. There has been a lot of legal wrangling about what the state’s MPOs should do in the years after 2020, with environmentalists arguing that an 80% reduction target by 2050 should be taken into account even though it is contained only in an executive order, not state law. (This dispute is still pending before the California Supreme Court in a case involving the San Diego Association of Governments.) SB 32 moots this argument in part by codifying the goal of a 40% reduction by 2030 – a target that would almost certainly require the state to be on a trajectory toward 80% by 2050, no matter what the Supreme Court rules in the SANDAG case. In the second round of SCSs, as Josh Stephens recently reported , the big MPOs have been focusing mostly on incremental changes, not major shifts that would move toward 40% by 2030 or 80% by 2050. Moving to the SB 32 target will almost certainly require a much bigger shift. How big a shift, however, depends in large part on how the Air Resources Board decides to implement SB 32. In the wake of AB 32 in 2006 and SB 32 in 2008, the ARB implemented a system that required the various MPOs to hit certain per-capita GHG targets in their regional transportation plans. This system has driven transportation investments in the RTPs (which are usually combined with the SCS) and, indirectly, may be affecting land-use decisions at the local level. It is not clear, however, how much of the SB 32 burden ARB will require the SCSs to bear. In June, the ARB issued a concept paper in anticipation of SB 32’s passage, which highlights four possible approaches to hitting SB 32’s 2030 target. The concept paper states that increased emissions reduction will have to come from the sustainable communities strategies but does not seek to quantify that amount. The paper does, however, make it clear that the SCS targets will depend a great deal on the state’s overall approach – and especially whether the state’s cap-and-trade pollution reduction program stays in place. Cap-and-trade is under increasing pressure from both polluting industries and environmental justice advocates. Under the cap-and-trade program, polluting industries – especially those that burn fossil fuels and therefore contribute to GHG emissions -- bid in an auction to purchase “allowances” that permit them to pollute. Cap-and-trade revenues currently fund a wide variety of state programs relevant to planning and development, including high-speed rail and the Strategic Growth Council’s affordable housing and sustainable communities program, which has $400 million for development grants this year. But the fossil-fuel industry is always targeting the program and revenues from this year’s auction were anemic.  Meanwhile, AB 197 could threaten the cap-and-trade program from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. From the beginning, environmental justice advocates have feared that cap-and-trade could harm poor neighborhoods disproportionately because ARB’s goal is to reduce the overall amount of emissions, not reduce emissions in specific locations. This question is always an issue in cap-and-trade programs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s cap-and-trade program for acid rain pollutants is always running into resistance from specific states that fear they will be at a disadvantage. For example, Ohio’s emissions might actually go up if Ohio polluters can buy pollution rights from locations, such as Florida or Pennsylvania, where pollution is cheaper to build up. Similarly, EJ advocates fear that polluting industries which purchase cap-and-trade allowances in California might choose to distribute those pollution allowances in a way that reinforces existing pollution patterns by focusing on existing older facilities near poor neighborhoods.  AB 197 seeks to mitigate that problem by requiring ARB to take “social costs” into account in setting up the cap-and-trade program. How, exactly, ARB is going to implement AB 197 is anybody’s guess . But it could mean that the cap-and-trade program is changed, reduced, or eliminated. And that will inevitably put pressure on the SCSs. Although the ARB concept paper does not quantify SCS emission reduction under different scenarios, it does generally characterize the degree of difficulty in each case. If cap-and-trade is retained, ARB reports, 2035 SCS targets will be subject to “increased stringency.” The same would be true of the state adopts a carbon tax, which is essentially a different way as the cap-and-trade program to get to the same goal.  Take away cap-and-trade or an equivalent policy, however, and the lift for SCSs becomes bigger. ARB outlined two alternative scenarios without a cap-and-trade program. The first focuses on reducing industrial pollution and requires “more ambitious targets” for SCSs. The second focuses on reducing transportation-related pollution – the other big contributor to GHG emissions – and, not surprisingly, calls for “ambitious stringency” in SCS targets. It’s not clear what “ambitious stringency” means, but it sounds pretty ominous. And that means more SCS fights ahead.

Despite consecutive seasons of miserable-to-average snowfalls in recent years, California ski resorts are moving ahead with ambitious expansion and development plans. In fact, less snow may simply mean that they’re being more aggressive about offering year-round attractions.  The latest development comes from Squaw Valley. The proposed Village at Squaw Valley would transform the mountain’s currently threadbare base area into a multi-use destination, with a hotel, retail and restaurant complex, 850 residential units, and a “Mountain Adventure Center” with indoor and outdoor recreational activities. Dreamt up and developed in relative haste for the 1960 Winter Olympics, Squaw Valley has never had a town or a base area to match those of rivals like Mammoth Mountain, Heavenly Valley, or Vail. After five years and over 400 community meetings, the Squaw Valley Specific Plan was approved, 4-2, by the Placer County Planning Commission in August. It will soon go before the Placer County Board of Supervisors. It is believed to be the largest project to be proposed in the county in recent memory.  Located just outside the Lake Tahoe Basin, northwest of the lake, the resort sits in an ecologically sensitive — and politically contentious — area (see prior CP&DR coverage ). Environmental groups and other activists pushed to reduce the project’s impacts and increase community benefits.  Before-and-after images of the Village at Squaw Valley.  "Squaw Valley Ski Holdings is prepared to significantly invest in the offering at Squaw Valley to position the resort as a true four-season destination, provide more year-round jobs, on-site affordable workforce housing, tens of millions of dollars in other benefits to our local community, and assist in stabilizing the North Lake Tahoe economy,” said Andy Wirth, president and CEO of Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, LLC, in a statement following the vote.  The plan for the village went through four major iterations, each one smaller than the last. The current version is half the size of the original proposal and, according to the resort, and is now only 38 percent of what is allowable per the Squaw Valley General Plan and Land Use Ordinance, which was adopted in 1983. Of the site’s 93 acres, only 12 will contain buildings. Ninety percent of the development will take place on current parking lots and other non-pristine land. Full build-out is planned to take 25 years.  Beyond the land-use plan, the resort has pledged to institute a range of mitigation measures to ease and offset environmental impacts. The resort will dedicate several million dollars to projects including stream restoration, upgrades to public parks, and support for public transit, plus a one-time $20 million payment to upgrade transit infrastructure. The plan estimates local tax revenues of $22 million annually that the county can allocate for environmental causes and social services.  "You already have a lot of established land uses that are primarily recreation- and-tourism based,” said Fisch. "If there is one specific issue area, that would be…the impacts of visitation because they inform the other impacts." The plan also estimates that by enabling visitors to lodge at the base of the mountain, rather than stay elsewhere and drive to the mountain, up to 2,000 trips per day may be eliminated from local roads on peak days.  Even these assurances do not comfort opponents of the current project. "The (environmental impact report) is simply fatally flawed," Richard Drury, an opponent of the project, told the Reno Gazette-Journal . He reportedly claimed that the plan’s figures on traffic and water availability cherry-picked different years with relatively few visitors and relatively high precipitation. "That is the kind of preposterous analysis that really requires a second look.”  Sierra Watch, a local environmental group, led an aggressive campaign to “keep Squaw true.” Its website contends that the plan includes ten-story buildings and amounts to a "massive and misplaced megaresort.” The plan pledges an average building height of 67 feet, which it says is “comparable” to the height of existing buildings on the site.  Representatives of Sierra Watch did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.  "It is a project that is within the holding capacity of the existing Squaw Valley general plan in that the project proponents are actually seeking to entitle development that would otherwise be permissible,” said Alex Fisch, supervising planner with Placer County Planning Services. “If there is a broad point of consensus among everyone, it's that the resort base does need redevelopment and does need to be made modern…the issue is, is this the right project?" "Their issues range from the character of the plan area to issues pertaining to increases in traffic and corollary effects with greenhouse gases as well as impact to habitat,” said Fisch. He added that the environmental impact report lists ten un-mitigatable impacts.  Contacts & Resources The Village at Squaw Valley  Overview Placer County Planning Department Documents Alex Fisch, Supervising Planner, Placer County Planning Services  AFisch@placer.ca.gov Images courtesy of Squaw Valley Ski Holdings LLC.

When is a historic structure not historic – or, at least, when it is not historic enough to warrant environmental impact report under the California Environmental Quality Act? When a local government says so, because local governments are accorded deference by courts in reviewing their CEQA actions – at least in cases like this. At least that was the conclusion of the Sixth District Court of Appeal in a case involving a century-old railroad trestle in the Willow Glen neighborhood of San Jose. The case involves interpretation of a confusing section of CEQA regarding when an historic resource is subject to an EIR. In making the ruling, the court had to go deep into the rabbit hole of substantial evidence and fair argument. San Jose is planning to tear down the scenic trestle and replace it with a steel structure. In the process, the city concluded that the trestle was not an historic resources and therefore not subject to an EIR. San Jose adopted a mitigated negative declaration instead. Neighbors and historic preservationists sued over the CEQA action, claiming that there was a fair argument that the trestle was a historic resource and therefore an EIR should be required. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Joseph Huber ruled in favor of the neighbors, saying that a fair argument standard should apply. The city appealed but the neighbors tried to have the case declared moot because the city had already prepared an EIR, which it then used to re-approve the project. The court went ahead and considered the case anyway, saying the city’s could be still be required to vacate the approval depending on the outcome of the case. At issue was whether the city had to apply the “fair argument” standard to the question of whether an EIR was required under the CEQA – that is, is there a fair argument that the project would have a significant impact on the environment (in the case, on an historic resource), as required under one section of CEQA, Public Resources Code Section 21084.1. The law further says that just because a building or structure is not included in any state or historic register and doesn’t meet other criteria for historic significance doesn’t mean that the lead agency can’t still designate it as historic. The neighbors argued that this last provision should apply and the trestle should be considered a historic resource for CEQA purposes even though it had not been designated as historic in any other way. The court noted that the lead agency has to make a decision about significance based on the “preponderance of the evidence” and therefore the standard of review “logically must be whether substantial evidence supports the lead agency’s decision , not whether a fair argument can be made to the contrary.” Continuing, Justice Nathan Mihara wrote for the court: “Since the standard of judicial review for a presumptively historical resource is substantial evidence rather than fair argument, it cannot be that the Legislature intended for the standard of judicial review for a lead agency’s decision under the final sentence of section 21084.1 to be fair argument rather than substantial evidence…. “We conclude,” he wrote, “that the Legislature did not intend for the fair argument standard to apply to a lead agency’s decision that a resource is not a historical resource under the final sentence of section 21084.1.” He added: “To construe the statute otherwise would be inconsistent with the Legislature’s explicit provision authorizing a lead agency to find that a resource that was presumed to be a historical resource was not a historical resource if the lead agency found that a preponderance of the evidence supported its finding. We therefore conclude that the deferential substantial evidence standard of review is the correct standard to apply to the City’s finding that the Trestle is not a historical resource.” The court remanded the case to Judge Mihara to determine the merits of the MND’s determination that there was no substantial evidence that the trestle is an historic resource The Case: Friends of Willow Glen Trestle v. City of San Jose, No. H041563 The Lawyers: For Friends of Willow Glen Trestle: Susan Brandt-Hawley, Brandt-Hawle Law Group, susanbh@preservationlawyers.com  For City of San Jose: Katie Zoglin, Senior Deputy City Attorney, mailto:katie.zoglin@sanjoseca.gov

When Donald Trump announced his team of economic advisors – the first group, the one that was all men – it consisted, not surprisingly, mostly of real estate guys from New York. In fact, there was only one Ph.D. economist in the group: Peter Navarro, a longtime business professor at UC Irvine, who apparently captured Trump’s attention with his book and film, Crouching Tiger , which talks about the possibility of war with China and how to avoid it. And for those of you with long memories of California growth control wars, yes, we’re talking about that Peter Navarro: The guy who ran for mayor of San Diego in 1992 – and almost won – on an anti-growth platform. Navarro has been all over the place in defense of Trump’s economic policies lately – for example, with this spirited attack on Moody’s negative analysis of Trump’s economic plan. And while Trump may have stumbled across Navarro’s work on his own, it’s far more likely that he was led to it by Dan DiMicco, the former CEO of Nucor Steel, who’s been Trump’s leading who helped persuade his company to provide financial backing for the film version of Navarro’s book. So what’s a guy who once ran for office on an anti-growth platform doing as an economic advisor to a real estate developer running for president? As it turns out, this makes more sense than you might think. At first you wouldn’t think Navarro has much in common with the supposedly business-oriented Trump, but the common theme of Navarro’s thinking has been to use governmental power to create limits and walls, the better to manage things for the benefit of those inside the walls. This was the fundamental concept of 1980s-style California growth management, which often allied left-wing neighborhood anti-growth activists with right-wing anti-immigration activists. And it’s the fundamental concept of Trump’s campaign. Another way to look at it is simply that Trump and California slow-growthers are win-lose folks, not win-win folks. A lot of economioc theorists -- free-traders, for example, and real-estate development free-marketeers -- believe that the more there is, better it is for everybody. But Trump clearly doesn't believe this. To him, there are always winners and losers -- so you'd better box out the other guy if you want to be a winner or else make him pay through the nose. And the California slow-growthers feel the same way: More development creates losers as well as winners, so you'd better box out the bad development or at least make those developers pay through the nose. Navarro’s apparently a Democrat, though he has jokingly said that his political party is “economist”. He first emerged in San Diego during the anti-growth backlash to the real estate boom of the late 1980s, when a citizen initiative was adopted limiting the number of housing units that could be built per year – even though previous growth management measures sought to align infrastructure and development. In spite of the fact that he was a trained economist who taught in a business school, Navarro seemed to me like a pretty typical California anti-growth guy of that era. I first met him at a Realtors forum on growth management in Irvine around that time, and he advocated pretty standard growth control policies. When the real estate folks tried to ask him about “affordable housing,” he waved his hand in the air – as if to swat the topic away – and said, “Separate issue.” By which he meant that, to him, affordable housing was a thing you had to create via government subsidies, not something you could create via the market by reducing regulation. Navarro ramped it up in 1992 when he ran for mayor . He platform was, again, standard-issue California growth control for the time: limited growth, tying development to infrastructure and services (for example, no additional housing without an increase in police officers) and, tellingly, immigration restrictions. He deliberately rejected the Construction Industry PAC endorsement and finished first in the primary against County Supervisor Susan Golding and City Councilmember Ron Roberts, an architect who was the odds-on favorite (and is now on the Board of Supervisors). But he lost to Golding in the runoff by four points and later lost races for city council and Congress. If he had defeated – and he had managed to navigate the notoriously treacherous political waters of San Diego City Hall (trust me on this one) – he might have been a seminal figure in the history of California planning. Instead he moved to Laguna Beach, kept teaching at UC Irvine, and focused on providing corporations with assessments of geopolitical risk. Which led him to China and to Trump. He does seem to believe that the United States has to use a lot of military muscle to keep things even with China – and it’s never clear where Trump is on that question – and he does believe in better trade deals and apparently still in immigration reform. He recently argued – a la the supply siders – that Trump’s proposed tax cuts wouldn’t increase the deficit all that much because of the economic growth it would stimulate. But so far, neither he nor Trump has weighed in on the question of whether the number of housing units should be restricted or tied to the provision of infrastructure and public services. Though it’s kinda believable that they don’t agree on that one.

California has suffered plenty of perverse effects of Proposition 13: cuts to school funding, ossification of neighborhoods, general constraints on cities, etc. Most of those effects are by design or were, at least, foreseeable by Howard Jarvis and the measure’s supporters.  In Los Angeles County a new unintended consequence has arisen that, though it might prove great for the county, probably has Jarvis spinning in his grave.  This week, Measure M officially made it on to the countywide ballot for November. The successor to 2008’s Measure R, Measure M would further the region’s long-range transportation plan by augmenting and extending the county’s half-cent sales tax indefinitely (30-plus years at least) to generate tens of billions of dollars for transportation projects. Like Measure R, which paid for popular projects like the Expo Line to Santa Monica and Gold Line extension to Azusa, Measure M is a Christmas tree of projects, sprinkled around the county so that the measure will appeal to just enough voters to make it pass. And, at an estimated $800 million in annual revenue, Measure M is one big Christmas tree — Rockefeller Center big. It includes 27 highway projects, 33 transit projects, and a good deal of local return monies. Many people are excited about these projects, and with good reason.  In some ways, though, the number of projects and amount of expected funding is a direct consequence of the number of voters that Measure M has to woo. That number is two-thirds of the electorate. That’s the margin needed to pass a new tax in California. Thanks to Proposition 13. The Jarvis people thought that this provision would curb public spending and ease Californians’ tax burden. At the very least, they sought to ensure that proposed taxes were structured sensibly enough to appeal to a broad swath of voters. Measure M, though, is different.  The great thing about planning is that plans on paper cost nothing. Therefore, it costs Metro nothing — at least not up-front — to heap on project after project to appeal to different jurisdictions and different interests groups. Measure M has something for everyone: drivers, transit advocates, bike advocates; city people, valley people, South Bay people, even high desert people. Metro’s hope is that if people don’t vote for the interests of the county as a whole, they’ll at least vote for their own parochial interests. That’s why even small jurisdictions and institutions — some as as specific and localized as Cal State University, Northridge — are keeping score . As the Los Angeles Daily News reports , not everyone is happy, especially cities in south and southwestern L.A. County. Metro just hopes that enough people are happy. (Note: Now that it's on the ballot, Metro cannot directly lobby for the measure.) You could call it politicking, but Metro is doing nothing if not playing by the rules.  It’s not hard to imagine, though, that if the rules required a simple majority, the Measure R package would look much different. For starters, package that had to appeal to only 50 percent of voters would likely be smaller. It also might be more efficient. It might, for instance, omit a rail line from Torrance to West Hollywood or a highway to Palmdale, willfully sacrificing voter support in favor of projects that will be more cost-efficient and/or serve more people. It might be able to put more money into active transportation in the urban core and less money into highways serving the suburbs. I'm not making value judgements about any of these projects. I'm just saying that Metro's strategy might have been different in a non-Prop 13 world. In other words, Prop 13 compels Metro, and anyone else seeking to raise revenue via a vote, to come up with not necessarily the best spending program but rather the spending program that has the best chance of passing.  While we can be sure that many Prop 13 advocates will want nothing to do with Measure M, we can be equally sure that over the next few months transit advocates in Los Angeles will be crying “All aboard!” to rouse support for Measure M's proposed trains. Or at least, “Two-thirds aboard!”  Image credit: L.A. Metro

As this week’s DNC guests are discovering, Philadelphia is no San Francisco. It's not New York, Boston, or D.C. either. It’s not even Cleveland . But delegates who are stuck in traffic  getting out of the Wells Fargo Center would do well to take a peek down the side streets as they drive up Broad Street to their hotels and discover some of the delights of the host city. That goes double for the California delegation. Most Californians have probably never seen a rowhouse. For the uninitiated, they are a form of townhouse (or terrace house in Europe), two or three stories, often with basements. They share side walls with their neighbors. Rear overlook face small yards or patios, and front walls face the street. They’re taller than they are wide, and they’re about as deep as they are tall.  They basically look like boxes of instant oatmeal aligned on a grocery shelf.  Rowhouses superficially resemble typologies like Brooklyn brownstones and San Francisco Victorians, insofar as they too are packed tightly and share side walls. But the beauty of true rowhouses  is that they have none of the trappings of those fancier cousins. No gingerbread flourishes or imposing stoops, and no dumbwaiters or maid’s quarters. They are blue-collar shelters that came of age when East Coast cities were industrial powerhouses. Workers made decent wages — enough to enable them to escape from tenements, but not enough to move into anything fancy. Rowhouses typically have flat brick facades, occasional details like cornices or porches, and an utterly functional design. They are the Model T of urban shelter. Unlike a 100-year old car, though, those 100-year old houses still run just fine.  While rowhouses are popular throughout the East Coast, particularly in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Virginia Beach, and parts of New York City, Philadelphia probably has more of them than any other city in the world. It has row upon row of rowhouses. As California cities agonize over how to house everyone, they are missing out on a typology with countless reasons to recommend it. Fundamentally, no typology so exquisitely balances the urban virtue of efficiency with the American virtue of individualism. Efficiency lies in the massing and use of space. Even two-story versions have floor-to-area ratios greater than 1. Shared walls mean that blocks are compact (and that heat dissipates slowly in the winter). A block that houses ten families in tract homes homes can house 100 in rowhouses. Unlike typical multifamily units, every rowhouse comes with its own address, advertising themselves as “home” to the people who live there. Rowhouses dispense with the gratuitousness of front yards, but their exteriors can express as much individualism as any lawn or feat of topiary. Some rowhouse residents plant tubs of flowers or even vegetables that put any lawn to shame. Some paint their shutters, doors, and other trim in imaginative colors. Some paint their entire facades. Others let their facades stand unadorned, in quiet conformity with their neighbors.  Suburban residents might protest that families need four walls to call their own and a freestanding structure to fawn over. Families in New York City and Los Angeles, among others, counter that two walls are better than zero. That’s essentially what you get in the multifamily dingbats and mid-rises of L.A., the mini-resorts of San Diego, and the walkups and high-rises of New York. Rowhouses promote a special kind of urbanism. The chance to walk out your front door and step immediately on to a sidewalk — in view of every other house on the block — creates a neighborliness that no apartment building ever could. Just like in the suburbs, residents are associated with their buildings and buildings with their residents. But rowhouse neighbors aren’t just fuzzy dots that scramble from front doors and into SUVs. Residents live close enough to be recognizable, but not so close that they feel obligated to each other. In very poor neighborhoods – of which there are too many in Philadelphia – squalor is contained on a house-by-house basis. It does not consume entire apartment buildings as it can in places like high-rise public housing complexes. Far from being monotonous or oppressive with their continuous facades and uniform roof heights, rowhouse streets are cozy — European, even. Streets are well framed and often lively, with subtle design flourishes that appeal to pedestrians, not to speeding drivers. There are no curb cuts to mar the sidewalks. There few streetscapes as pleasant as a rowhouse street with a canopy of mature trees. Appropriately, in the city where the United States liberated itself from England, rowhouses liberate their owners from another form of tyranny and taxation: homeowners associations. Rowhouses confer all the communal benefits of condominium living with none of the expense of HOA dues or headaches of creating and conforming with HOA regulations. Of course, if your roof leaks, you have to fix it yourself.  If entire East Coast cities are built on rowhouses, why does California have, essentially, zero? Surely culture is one reason. City founders in California weren’t about to emulate the tired, oppressive old East Coast. But those attitudes are changing. Many California cities are embracing density. Rowhouses might be perfect for low-density urban neighborhoods that really should be medium density. Except for those darn regulations. Rowhouses are basically what you get when a city wants to provide single-family homes and goes full-on libertarian. If you get rid of setback requirements, floor-to-area ratio maximums, buffer zones between structures, and height restrictions, you almost inevitably end up with rowhouses. California isn't quite there yet.  You need one more thing: no parking requirements.  When you live side-by-side in houses no wider than a car is long, there’s no room for a garage (unless you have generous alleyways). There’s also little need for a car. Rowhouse neighborhoods are generally dense enough to maximize the use of public transit. and because they’re dense, they’re usually not afraid of neighborhood-serving commercial, like restaurants, bars, and convenience stores. So they’re walkable and bikeable. If rail transit is nearby, so much the better.  For all the fleeting political proclamations that are likely to come out of Philadelphia this week, we also know that the city is capable of spawning universal, enduring institutions. We could do worse than to add a certain modest, functional, and efficient housing type to that list. Goodness knows, we all could use some modesty these days.  Photo credit: Eric Fischer via Flickr  creative commons.

A Los Angeles native and longtime journalist, Josh Stephens has covered planning, land use, and architecture as an editor and freelance journalist for the better part of a decade. He succeeded Paul Shigley as the third editor of the California Planning & Development Report in February 2010. He is now a Contributing Editor of the publication. Stephens previously edited T he Planning Report and Metro Investment Report , monthly newsletters covering, respectively, land use and infrastructure in the Los Angeles region. As a freelance writer Stephens has been a regular contributor to  CP&DR , and he contributes frequently to, among others,  Planetizen.com, Common Edge Collaborative, Metropolis, Next City, Sierra, InTransition , and Planning  Magazine.  He also writes for Planetizen's Interchange blog and contributes to its annual list of the top books in urban planning. He is the author of The Urban Mystique : Notes on California, Los Angeles, and Beyond , published by Solimar Books, and of Planners Across America , published by Planetizen Press.  Stephens holds a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University and a master's in public policy from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.  He formerly taught high school journalism, English, and AP Geography at the Archer School in Los Angeles. He serves on the board of the Westside Urban Forum and on the Brentwood Community Council. 

Editor & Publisher WILLIAM FULTON, AICP, founded in 1986. A former newspaper reporter, Bill has worn many hats: principal in the consulting firm now known as Placeworks , Mayor of Ventura, Planning Director of the City of San Diego, Vice President for Policy at Smart Growth America , Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research , and most recently Visiting Policy Designer at the UC San Diego Design Lab. Bill is the author of eight books, including three considered classics in their field.    L.A. Times  best-seller, uses novelistic storytelling techniques to trace the way a leading metropolis grew and developed co-authored with architect Peter Calthorpe, is a pathbreaking work that has reshaped understanding of how metropolitan regions should be planned and designed. Three decades after its original publication,   remains the standard textbook for urban planning classes. His most recent book is Bill was a member of the Ventura City Council from 2003 to 2011, serving as Mayor from 2009 to 2011. In that capacity he led Ventura’s innovative effort to promote sensitive infill development. He was active in the incorporation of the City of West Hollywood in 1984 and was one of the first appointees to the West Hollywood Planning Commission upon its creation in 1986. Bill holds a master’s degree in journalism/public affairs from The American University in Washington, D.C., and a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Even as forests thin out and die on a warming planet, a collection of trade unions are missing them for the trees.  As reported in the New York Times a few weeks ago, a coalition of trade unions has raised a stink about a partnership between the AFL-CIO and an anti-Donald Trump “super PAC" funded in part by billionaire tech investor Tom Steyer. Steyer is not just a Silicon Valley superstar. He is also — and here’s where it gets frustrating — an environmentalist.  The unions opposed to the super PAC don’t seem to have an opinion about climate change one way or another. But they do feel strongly about one teeny-tiny symbol of the fight against climate change: the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Because Steyer is against climate change and against Keystone, he must, ipso facto, also be against unions. At least that’s how the unions’ logic goes.  In a letter addressed to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of of Laborers International Union of North America , calls Steyer a “billionaire job-killer and environmental extremist….his vision of leaving oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels in the ground kills jobs…and threatens to strangle our economy.” All of this to oppose a protest against Donald Trump, whose potential influence on job growth — union or otherwise — is anybody’s guess (i.e. probably catastrophic).  Of course, unions don’t have a vested interest in the substance of Keystone — except that Keystone represents potential union jobs. The same way that a prison might. Or a rail line. Or a solar power plant. Or a low-income apartment complex. Oblique as this connection is, I suppose I can’t begrudge unions for supporting a union project. Except the number of union jobs that Keystone would generate pales in comparison to the number of union jobs — not to mention nonunion — that a full-blown national and global campaign against climate change would generate.  A more measured anti-Steyer message from a separate coalition of trade unions (including plumbers, welders, masons, and roofers) says they "ensure that the employment prospects of our members are not negatively impacted in any economic and energy transition.” Forget about negative impact. What about positive impact?  Last year Mother Jones reported that the world spent $391 billion on technologies and infrastructure designed to combat climate change in 2014. It reported that the ideal amount is more like $7 trillion. Per year.  Of course, this is just a wild estimate. The real number could be a lot higher, but whatever. Just imagine how many jobs — in every industry imaginable — that $7 trillion would represent. That's about one-third the annual GDP of the United States, which has about 120 million workers, and represents about 10 percent of global GDP. If, therefore, US GDP rose 10 percent due to climate change mitigation (surely a low figure, since the US’s share of global GDP is disproportionately high, as is its share of greenhouse gases and the technologies to reduce them), it would add 12 million jobs.  Guess how many union workers there are — in every union — in the United States today? 14.5 million.  So let’s make the debate clear: A $7 billion pipeline that would create a grand total of 1,950 jobs per year for two years, according to Newsweek , is more important than a moral imperative that could create nearly as many jobs as there are union workers in the United States? In California, these jobs are palpable. Regulations like Senate Bill 375 and Senate Bill 743 promoting infill development, and the state and cities are investing billions in transit projects (not to mention highways too). Much of those monies are going straight into union workers’ bank accounts. I don’t exactly favor catastrophe-oriented economic development plans. But, really, every constituency to the left of the Ku Klux Klan should pay attention to the economic benefits of what jurisdictions like California are doing. If we end up with better cities and more efficient transportation, those benefits will persist for generations to come.  Steyer’s opponents can put that in their pipe(line) and smoke it.