Like any visionary railroad baron, Leland Stanford hung on to some of the land at the end of the line -- in his case, the original Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford might not have imagined, however, that the ultimate fate of much of his land would depend not on the iron horse but instead on frogs, salamanders, and trout.   In the century since the Governor Stanford first deeded land to the university that bears his name, several of its native species have qualified for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, thus restricting Stanford University's ability to develop or otherwise use the land to fulfill its academic mission. The Stanford Habitat Conservation Plan is intended to ensure the land's long-term protection even as the university grows.  Developed in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the HCP would preserve, via conservation easement, key components of roughly 5,000 acres of open space in the foothills above Palo Alto while permitting potential development or other disruptive uses on up to 180 acres.  "Targeting the high-quality areas for the five covered species that we have in the plan…puts a comprehensive structure to it and expands the conservation work we've done," said Catherine Palter, Stanford's associate director of Land Use and Environmental Planning. Those species include the red-legged frog, tiger salamander, steelhead trout, western pond turtle, and San Francisco garter snake.  For opponents, though, 180 acres of developable acres is too many, even on a campus as large as Stanford's.  Critics of the plan are particularly concerned about its vague description of where development might take place. The permanently protected acres include riparian corridors and oak-studded hillsides within roughly 300 feet of San Francisquito Creek and tributary streams, which provide key habitat for the endangered species; the plan also includes a tiger salamander preserve that is off-limits to all development.  The plan is intended to preserve and enhance habitat for endangered species and provide an "umbrella of protection" for other species on the land. The plan outlines monitoring and restoration activities that the university will conduct and commits the university to long-term stewardship of the land. In return, the university gets federal permission to "take" -- harm, kill, or otherwise disrupt -- endangered species on up to 180 acres that could be sprinkled almost anywhere on wide swaths of land, deep into the foothills and relatively far from the main campus.  This lack of specificity troubles Brian Schmidt, legislative advocate for the Committee for Green Foothills.  "Nobody knows where they (the developable acres) are," said Schmidt. "They could potentially be extremely important."  Schmidt added that the HCP provides for more developable acres than Stanford's own "Sustainable Stanford" plan calls for and therefore opens more habitat than is necessary. That plan, however, has only a 25-year time horizon, as opposed to the HCP's 50 years.  "They seem to make a projection that they're still going to be developing between 1 and 3 acres of habitat a year," said Schmidt. "I think they're overestimating the amount of impact that they're anticipating and are trying to get permits for." Schmidt said that he would prefer to see Stanford identify a smaller and more defined area for potential habitat disruption.  The plan's architects insist, however, that giving the university a single, blanket clearance to disrupt those 180 acres is preferable to a more haphazard alternative.  "It puts down a comprehensive and cohesive strategy to conserve endangered species," said Sheila Larsen, senior staff biologist with the Sacramento Office of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service "Otherwise, they would be coming in on a project-by-project basis." Larsen said that without the HCP, development – or lack thereof – in the foothills would take place on a "piecemeal" basis.  The draft HCP was completed in July 2009 and the draft Environmental Impact Statement was released in April 16, 2010. A 90-day public comment period on the EIS was to have ended July 15 but has been extended to Aug. 30. The federal permissions to disrupt endangered species do not, however, preclude local regulations or the need for analysis mandated by the state or counties.  "This plan does not, for instance, absolve them of their responsibilities under CEQA to do their appropriate CEQA documents the construction of any buildings," said Larsen.  Stanford's Palter said that potential development governed by the HCP should not be confused with the university's long-term development plans for its main campus. The university intends to concentrate virtually all new development within the existing campus footprint. However, she said that the university wanted to reserve the right to disrupt habitat either for the purpose of development or even for academic projects that might be so disruptive as to require a permit.  "On the one hand, we don't have anything planned," said Palter. "But on the other, but if something should be proposed in the future and receives its local land-use approvals we know how it would be mitigated under the HCP for Endangered Species Act compliance." Larsen insisted that by keeping the riparian corridors off-limits, any development or academic activities would have relatively low impacts.  "The plan provides for a certain amount of…avoidance and minimization, which includes siting most of those 180 acres outside of environmentally sensitive areas," said Larsen.  Palter admitted that the university has no specific plans for those acres –- many of which are not contiguous with the main campus -- but noted that with a 50-year plan the university wanted to maintain a degree of flexibility.  Regardless of whether the university will exercise its right to use those acres, the HCP calls for the university to oversee conservation efforts on the entire 5,000 acres. It mandates the establishment of a land trust but does not include specific details regarding the administration or independence of the trust. Critics of the plan contend that anything short of an independent board might enable the university to shirk its obligations to preserve the land properly.  "There's no detail about how that land trust would be organized and how it would maintain its independence and its ability to enforce easements against Stanford, especially if Stanford is the body that's organizing it," said Schmidt. Schmidt called on Stanford to establish an independent board and to give the trust sufficient financing for it to be able to bring lawsuits against the university if needed.  The HCP does not lay out those details, but Palter said that the HCP would require the trust to submit annual reports to Fish and Wildlife to ensure compliance.  One of the more controversial issues that has arisen in the discussion of the HCP is actually not in the HCP itself. The environmental group Beyond Searsville Dam, headed by environmental consultant Matt Stoecker, is concerned about the fate of the obsolete Searsville Dam, a 65-foot high, 275-wide dam that dates back to 1892. Impounding the waters of San Francisquito Creek, the dam serves no useful purpose, and the lake behind it is now 90 percent sediment.  The university has agreed to dredge the lake and to study options for fish passage so that steelhead trout can surmount the dam, but Beyond Searsville Dam has called for the university to take stronger action. Stoecker ultimately wants the university to remove the dam entirely. Stoecker said that he sees the drafting of the HCP as an opportunity to get the university to commit to its removal, especially because the HCP covers land and riparian features that are surrounding and affected by the dam.   "What we're really asking for is a collaborative process and doing a study just to see if dam removal is feasible and how best to do it," said Stoecker. "You'd think one of the world's leading institutions would be interested in having all the data." Stanford's Palter, however, said that dam removal is simply too complex and costly for the university to commit to anything of the sort at the present time and therefore is not included in the HCP at all.  "It's unrelated, but we're hearing the comments because the HCP is out for public review," said Palter. "It's not in the HCP because the HCP needs to have very definite plans for what's called covered activities."  Contacts and Resources Stanford HCP Draft Environmental Impact Statement Stanford HCP Official Site Sheila Larsen, Senior Staff Biologist. Sacramento Office of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, (916) 414-6600  Catherine Palter, Associate Director of Land Use and Environmental Planning, Stanford University, (650) 723-0199 Brian Schmidt, Legislative Advocate, Committee for Green Foothills , (650) 968-7243 Matt Stoecker, Beyond Searsville Dam , (650) 380-2965 -- Josh Stephens

Jamboree Road might not become the next Park Avenue, but a new vision plan recently completed by the City of Irvine signals a major shift away from the suburban lifestyle of Orange County. One of the early cities to pioneer the strict segregation of office-park style commercial development from master-planned residential areas, Irvine will be allowing thousands of new residential units into its business core in the coming decades.  The Irvine Business Complex vision plan calls for increasing residential density and creating mixed-use neighborhoods throughout a 2,000-acre swath along the 405 freeway and south of John Wayne Airport. The area is currently occupied almost exclusively by commercial and industrial uses. Prior to the adoption of the vision plan, up to 9,000 units had been slated for the area, many of which have already been built or permitted.  The plan increases that number by 6,000, to 15,000 total. The plan also provides for 6 million square feet of office, industrial, and retail space that will be interspersed among the residential development, thus breaking down the strict segregation of land uses that have long characterized Southern California cities.  Nearly 90,000 jobs and over 4,500 businesses makes it one of Southern California's largest employment centers. The city claims that it has a stark jobs-housing imbalance, with three jobs for every one residential unit. The vision plan aims to provide housing for workers to live near their jobs and provides for neighborhood amenities including parks and retail.  Upon full build-out � in an estimated 20 years � the area will be one of the most densely populated in the county. What it may not be, however, is a cohesive, walkable community, according to its most outspoken critic on the Irvine City Councilmember, Christina Shea.  Shea said she is concerned that haphazard development within the IBC might not knit the community together but instead create residential pockets without effective internal connections.  "The plan is really not a complete overlay plan. You're going to have many businesses and older residential that aren't participating in this plan," said Shea. "If it was completely redesigned and everything was going to be new and blending�I think it would be marvelous." Thus, the IBC faces the increasingly common challenge of retrofitting an already built-up area with infill.  "It's going to be almost a mish-mash of new and old," said Shea.   To some, that "mish-mash," translates into the flexibility to develop incrementally and to gently wean Irvine off its history of greenfield development.   "In a planning area that's as diverse as this, where you have very industrial areas in certain places and emerging mixed use cores in other areas�a plan needs to be specific enough to last through the environmental process but also flexible enough to apply equally across the entire planning area," said Patrick Strader, an attorney who collaborated with the city on drafting the vision plan.  Moreover, the very age of the IBC all but requires the introduction of new development. Chris Lynch, vice president of Business and Economic Development Irvine Chamber of Commerce, said that much of the current inventory in the IBC area is "from a different era" and nearing the end of its useful life. "It's going to give an impetus to re-landscape this area without having to go through the formality of a redevelopment district," said Lynch.  Culminating a planning process begun in 2005, the Irvine City Council approved both the environmental impact report for the IBC and a general plan amendment with a mixed use overlay zoning code. Both resolutions were read twice, on July 13 and July 26, and passed without opposing votes.  "In the early 2000s we were seeing more pressures for development in the IBC," said Tim Gherich, manager of Development & Planning Services. "As opposed to dealing with developments on a case-by-case basis, the council decided to put a hold on (development) and look at a larger vision for that area." The approved general plan element replaces a former density cap of 52 residential units per acre with a new density floor of 30 units per acre. Ultimately, the plan does not create a net gain in intensity because the newly approved residential development was offset by an equivalent reduction in approved commercial and industrial development.  "It's a trade-off between residential and non-residential," said Gehrich. If developers pursue density bonuses for affordable housing, per SB 1818, the number of residential units could increase by another 2,000 units.  The IBC may also help Irvine meet housing goals assigned to it by the Southern California Association of Governments' 2004 regional housing needs assessment. SCAG has called for the city to add 35,000 units, including 21,000 affordable units. The city has vehemently contested those numbers and sued SCAG over them ( CP&DR Vol. 22, No. 9 ). The city claimed that the SCAG numbers represent a disproportioned burden on the city in light of its population � with 40 percent of the assigned housing burden but only 6 percent of the county's population. However, in October a Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the regional planning agency.  While Lynch said that the vision plan has garnered praise from the city's business community, Shea said that she is concerned that the IBC places an undue burden on the area's residential developers. The plan calls for infrastructure retrofits and other expenses that will be passed on to developers at a rate of roughly $75,000 per unit.  "I just do not think it's fair that the residential developers have to pay the entire $80 million exaction," said Shea. "Why aren't they having to chip in for this overlay plan?" Some of that expense stems from opposition from neighboring cities of Tustin and Newport Beach.  Both cities sued Irvine on the grounds that traffic from IBC would put undue strain on those cities' roads and other infrastructure. The city has already paid $3.6 million in impact fees to Newport Beach and has agreed to give Tustin between $4.5 and $6.5 million.  Plans for high-rise office and apartment buildings also gave the John Wayne Airport Land Commission pause shortly before the ordinances came before the council. However, the plan was altered to keep taller buildings away from flight paths.  "The city put in the plan that no buildings would penetrate the imaginary obstruction surface," said Kari Rigoni, executive officer of the Orange County Airport Land Commission. "That's calculated based on FAA regulations. That satisfied the commission."  Strader said that two industrial occupants of the IBC � Allergen pharmaceuticals and paint manufacturer Deft -- had expressed reservations about the placement of residential development close to their factories. In response, the plan was altered to create 1,000-foot buffer zones.  For many of those companies' neighbors, the vision plan represents a chance to attract and retain a new generation of employees that are not necessarily looking for suburban single-family homes.  "We have a lot of video gaming companies here and their employees are very much interested in live-work areas," said Lynch. Paradoxically, the emphasis on residential development may "enhance the city's identity as a jobs center."  As a result, Lynch said that the IBC vision plan represents a major step in the city's maturation, away from the days when brand-new buildings were sprouting on virgin ranchland.  "There's still some greenfields left in the city, but really it's Phase II" of the city's maturation, said Lynch. "It's no longer so much filling things out, it's concentrating things, making them a little bit more dense, and combining living and working."  Contacts & Resources City of Irvine IBC Official Site and Planning Documents Chris Lynch, Vice President of Business and Economic Development, Irvine Chamber of Commerce (949) 660-9112  Kari Rigoni, Executive Officer, John Wayne Airport Land Use Commission, (949) 252-5170 Christina Shea, City Council Member , City of Irvine, (949) 724-6000 Patrick Strader, The Law Offices of Patrick Strader, (949) 622-0422 -- Josh Stephens

Mere conclusions and assumptions do not amount to substantial evidence to support a finding of physical blight, an appellate court has ruled in upholding a challenge by the County of Los Angeles against the City of Glendora.  In this case, the county challenged blight findings adopted by the City of Glendora, including the Glendora Redevelopment Agency. Upholding precedent set by Evans v. City of San Jose (2005) 128 Cal.App.4th 1123, 1131, in which the judge ruled that "a finding that a project area is blighted is the absolute prerequisite for redevelopment," the court found that the blight findings were not supported by substantial evidence, and therefore, Glendora lacked any eminent domain authority in this instance. Over the years, Glendora's redevelopment area had grown from one to five project areas. In 2006, Glendora adopted an ordinance approving the redevelopment plan for four of the five project areas. As required, the ordinance concluded that blight existed in all four project areas. This conclusion was generally based on a report by consultant Robert Miars concerning blight data in Project Area 3, and reports by GRC Redevelopment Consultants completed in 2004 and 2006 concerning Project Areas 1, 2 and 5. The county opposed the adoption of the ordinance during the administrative process, and shortly after the ordinance was adopted, the county filed this lawsuit challenging Glendora's blight findings. After the trial court found in favor of the County, Glendora appealed. On appeal, the court focused on the second of four statutory element needed to make a finding of blight, namely "the area must be ‘characterized by' one or more conditions of physical blight, as statutorily defined" as established in County of Los Angeles, 185 Cal.App.4th at 832. As to the other three elements, the court found that the area was clearly urbanized (the first element), and the court found it unnecessary to address the third and fourth statutory elements of economic blight and community burden because the required finding of physical blight under the second element was not substantiated. Government Code section 33031, subdivision (a) outlines four conditions that constitute physical blight. Those four conditions are the following: (1) Buildings in which it is unsafe or unhealthy for persons to live or work…; (2) Factors that prevent or substantially hinder the viable use or capacity of buildings or lots…; (3) Adjacent or nearby uses that are incompatible with each other and which prevent the economic development of those parcels or other portions of the project area; (4) The existence of subdivided lots of irregular form and shape and inadequate size for proper usefulness and development that are in multiple ownership. (Gov. Code, § 33031, subd. (a).) The appellate court emphasized that each of the blight findings, including the physical blight conditions, requires that the agency show a causal connection between the evidence and the actual finding. For example, merely showing a code violation does not equate to a finding that a building is unsafe. Instead, there must be evidence in the record showing how the code violation results in an unsafe building. After going through each of the possible physical blight conditions, the court concluded that Glendora failed to show any causal connection between the actual evidence – such as code violations, sewage problems, roof and exterior building damage, defective design, and building age – and the four physical conditions that constitute physical blight. In once instance, Glendora asserted that the buildings could possibly contain asbestos and lead-based paint and may have substandard wiring issues based on the year they were built. Regarding such claims, the court stated, " ost of these blight claims do not rest on evidence; instead, they rely on assumptions based on building age" (County of Los Angeles, 185 Cal.App.4th at 842). Assumptions and presumptions do not amount to substantial evidence of unsafe or unhealthy conditions.  Based on the lack of causal connection, the court held that the blight findings in Glendora's ordinance were not supported by substantial evidence, and therefore, Glendora was not authorized to exercise any eminent domain power. This case acts as a reminder that mere conclusions and assumptions do not amount to substantial evidence in any administrative decision. The actual connection between the evidence and the findings is necessary. More specifically, this case provides practical examples of how to craft the blight findings and the evidence that should be included in the record. CASE: County of Los Angeles v. Glendora Redevelopment Project (2010) Cal.Rptr.3d ___ Cal.App.6th ____. LAWYERS: For the City of Glendora:  Allison E. Burns, Jennifer Yu, Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth, (949) 725-4000David S. Ettinger, Jeremy B. Rosen, Horvitz & Levy LLP, (818) 995-0800 For the County of Los Angeles:  Raymond G. Fortner Jr., County Counsel Robert E. Kalunian, Acting County Counsel, Elizabeth Cortez, Assistant County Counsel, Thomas M. Tyrrell, Principal Deputy County Counsel, Kathryn Reimann, Law Offices of Kathryn Reimann, (213) 974-1811 Cori M. Badgley is an attorney with the firm of Abbott and Kindermann, LLP .

More than a decade ago, when I was writing my book The Reluctant Metropolis , I became so fascinated by the political changes in the so-called Hub Cities of southeast Los Angeles County that I wrote a chapter about them. Over time I came to love these towns – Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Bell, Cudahy, Maywood – because they had a proud working-class history and an all-American optimism that had been renewed when their population  shifted from mostly white to mostly Latino. There was both a modesty and a pride in these towns that seemed to me to represent all that was wonderful about the American spirit. When it came time to write the chapter, however, I chose to call it "Suburbs of Extraction." This was a play on longstanding political science theory, which makes a distinction between "suburbs of consumption" (where people live) and "suburbs of production" (where factories are located). As the Hub Cities had gone downhill after the Watts riots of 1965, it seemed to me, the primary economic activity in these communities was not consuming things or producing things, but extracting what little wealth remained, as a mining company might extract coal or copper. Apartment builders, casinos, scrap-metal recycling companies – all were in the extraction business. So too, I suspected, were some of the politicians, especially those with close relationships with these other businesses. The main lesson of the chapter was that even though the ethnicity of the politicians had changed during a volatile political upheaval in the 1990s, their basic method of doing business had not.  As one resident of Huntington Park told me with a sigh, "We thought when we elected Latinos they would help us." I hoped I was wrong, of course. Or at least I hoped that extraction – legal or illegal – was maybe just a phase, and that eventually the Hub Cities would grow out of it. In time, some did. In some cities, such as South Gate,  corruption was rooted out, new faces were swept into office, and life was much improved. However, as we've seen in the current scandal in Bell – with its $800,000 city manager, its $450,000 police chief, its $100,000 councilmembers, and its more or less hostile takeover of neighboring Maywood – it's still possible to do well in the political extraction business in southeast L.A. County. Much of the blame, of course, lies with the individuals involved, who have taken a highhanded approach with taxpayer funds and, at least so far, seem pretty unrepentant about it. But much of the blame also lies with California's Byzantine system of local government, which gives officials in a small, poor city – elected and appointed – what detectives might call opportunity and motive to misbehave. The motive lies in California's squeaky-clean, progressive-era approach to local elected service, which assumes that you can, as it were, de-politicize politics. Elected officials are supposed to act like a board of directors, not like political hacks. Governmental managers are supposed to be highly trained professionals, not political cronies. Managers should be well-paid for their efficient, productive work; and electeds should be viewed essentially as volunteers, as if they were serving on a nonprofit board. Viewed as a reaction against corrupt political machines of a century ago, this approach makes some sense. But the truth of the matter is that you can't de-politicize politics. The councilmembers in Bell are almost always referred to in the Times as "part-time," and the expectation is that their base pay – like their colleagues in other cities, including me – should be a few hundred dollars a month. But in truth there is no such thing as a part-time politicians, even if you are a politician in a small town. Politics will take as much time as you want to throw at it, and in order to stay in touch with your constituents you have to make the endless rounds of meetings and coffees and community events, which sometimes start at breakfast and last late into the evening, with little respite on the weekends. Devoting yourself to this task and having a job at the same time can be punishing indeed, and many don't even try to have a job, no matter what the consequences. I once knew a small-town mayor who got divorced when his wife finally said: "I never see you, okay. You make no money, OK. But I can't put up with both." Most of us who run for local office know that we're buying this situation and we buy it willingly, along with the divorces, financial pressure, and strain with our day-job employers that inevitably follows. We do it for the power, or for the glory, or just because we want to help make our communities better. (Usually it's combination of all three.) But there's always a temptation to ease the burden by finding some way – legal or illegal – to extract some extra money out of the system because the base pay is so poor. As for professional governmental managers, the Bell situation is a farcical manifestation of the reasonable expectation that they should be well compensated for the difficult task of running fairly large and complex organizations in a businesslike manner. A good city manager is hard to find and usually worth what he or she is paid. But there's a fine line between demanding good compensation as a matter of professional pride and insisting – as Bell's Robert Rizzo did in defending his $800,000 compensation package – that he could make just as much or more in private industry, which simply isn't true. So that's the motive, which is an understandable – if somewhat ugly – reflection of typical human feelings and emotions.  But the real scandal, if there is one, lies in the way the supposedly "clean" California system provides the opportunity for public servants to shield their activities from public view. There are almost 500 cities in California, most of them small. (In the "Hub Cities" area where Bell is located there are eight cities in an area that's about one-sixth the size of the San Fernando Valley.) Californians like all these cities, and believe that the existence of small cities protects them from the corrupting influence of big-city political machines. That's true – if the constituents are paying attention. But the progressive-era system in California often discourages them from taking a closer look. All local elections in California are nonpartisan and most take place in March or April; in many cities as well, the mayor is a rotating position, kind of like the chairman of the board. The obvious result is a low turnout. I have been elected to the Ventura City Council twice in typical low-turnout elections, each time having received about 8,000 votes in a city of 108,000 people with 60,000 registered voters. In cities like Bell, the problem is even worse. So many residents are immigrants ineligible to vote that the election is controlled by a very small number of people. Bell has 40,000 residents but only 9,000 registered voters because so many residents are not eligible to vote. In the last City Council election (in March of 2009) only about 2,000 people voted and the winners received about 1,200 votes each. (Several times, Bell hasn't even scheduled an election because nobody challenged the incumbents. Cities can cancel elections if they are uncontested.) Such low turnouts mean not only that most people are not engaged in the question of who runs their city, but that city leaders know they don't really have to be accountable to most of their constituents. Most of the Hub Cities were controlled by white politicians for decades after the whites had fled, simply because the only voters were the few whites who stayed behind. The California system also discourages constituents from being watchdogs in that both the governmental and financial system is cumbersome and bafflingly complicated. Different city governments provide services in all kinds of different ways. Some have a police department, some contract with the sheriff; some run fire departments, libraries, and parks, while others are located in a special district where the city has nothing to do with providing fire, library, or parks service. So it's hard to know what your city does or where your tax money goes. And all California cities are subject to thousands of laws that even the most assiduous city attorney has a hard time keeping up with. A complicated system belongs to those who understand it and, frankly, makes it possible for the insiders to game the system. The best example of this in the Bell situation was the 2005 election to become a charter city. Under California law, "general law" cities are governed mostly by state law while cities with charters have more independence. For local residents, living in a charter city is usually a good thing, as it gives their city more flexibility to respond to local circumstance rather than slavishly adhere to state law. That's how Bell's 2005 charter vote was sold to the voters, but it wasn't the real reason why the city pursued the vote. The real reason was that the state had passed a law limiting city council pay in cities like Bell to $400 a month. At that time the Bell councilmembers were making something like $60,000 a year, mostly by paying themselves additional compensation for serving on various boards the city had created mostly for the purpose of increasing the councilmembers pay.   As it turned out, of course, the city didn't have to do much persuading. The special election to create a charter city was held on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving – a month before the new law went into effect – and only 336 people voted. By the way, everybody's pay went way up after the charter vote. Since that vote, the City Council's overall pay has increased 50%, and the compensation for the City Manager and other top officials – which had been, up to then, on the high side of normal – moved into the stratosphere. So democracy only works, even in small cities, if people pay attention, and oftentimes people aren't paying attention. But one of the most disturbing aspects of the Bell situation – at least to me, a former journalist – is how hard it is to figure out what's happening even if you are paying attention. In spite of the state's vaunted Brown Act open-meetings law, California governments are still not particularly transparent.  This is especially true when it comes to compensation for top managers. It can be really hard for the average person to find out for sure how much their city manager makes. Sometimes you can find a range if you look in city documents, but that doesn't always tell the whole story. If you don't believe me, try calling up your city and asking; you're almost certain to get a pause and a cough on the other end of the phone. In the case of Bell, Bloomberg News reported that, in 2008, an average citizen innocently inquired about the city manager's salary was given a one-page information sheet that  indicated his salary was $185,000. Which, apparently, was true. It wasn't until journalists from the Los Angeles Times showed up, knowing how to work the Public Records Act, that the full truth came out. (Here in Ventura, our city manager's salary is $174,000 per year – well below his peers and about the same as it was when he was hired in 2004.) What's disturbing about the Bell situation – and whatever other Bells that haven't uncovered yet – is the insidious and systematic way the system was gamed. At least in places like Lynwood, the politicians engaged in old-fashion corruption – bribes, steering business to certain companies, the good old-fashioned stuff anybody from Chicago would understand. The constituents have the satisfaction of seeing their mayor arrested, convicted, and sent to jail. But odds are that when the District Attorney completes his investigation in Bell, he's going to find that no laws were broken. The system – which is mostly set up by the state – has a lot of exploitable weaknesses. Clever and unscrupulous people, operating in a town where nobody was paying attention, found the weaknesses and exploited them all. How do you fix that? There are two ways. First, change the system. Second, make sure somebody's paying attention. Attorney General Jerry Brown has talked about capping local government salaries, but it's hard to imagine how this would work. Who would cap them? At what amount? How and when would they be changed? Capping salaries would be emotionally satisfying to the electorate, but it's pretty easy to see the unintended consequences coming. It's probably better simply to require full disclosure. In the past two weeks, much has been made of the fact that you can find out any corporate CEO's compensation (through Securities & Exchange Commission filings) far more easily than the compensation of your local city manager. It would not be difficult to pass a law requiring all cities (and counties) to report the total compensation of their top managers to the state, and/or publish those figures on the web site. There's precedent for this. The entire public pension debate in the state has been transformed by the simple fact that the California Pension Reform web site has a searchable database of all state and local retirees whose pensions exceed $100,000. More than any other single factor, this website database has put political pressure on state and local governments to reform pensions. (If you think local government isn't very transparent, try figuring out how the California Public Employees Retirement System works. It's almost impossible.) Just imagine if this website – or one like it – made the compensation packages for all high-level local government managers available in the same fashion. The Bells of the world would be embarrassed into falling into line. The thing about most extractive industries is that they aren't very sustainable. Sooner or later, the mine is played out, or all the developable land is gone. But tax revenue goes on forever. It may go up or down over time, but the revenue stream is always there – available to those clever and unscrupulous enough to grab a piece of it. It was sad enough to see the wonderful little towns in southeast Los Angeles County turn into suburbs of extraction through a series of economic and political upheavals a generation ago. It would be sadder still to see many more California cities turn into suburbs of extraction because so many governmental managers become industrious miners when nobody is paying attention. -- Bill Fulton

The First District Court of Appeal determined that the California Environmental Quality Act exemption for infill development applies only to projects within the limits of an incorporated city. Abiding strictly by rhetoric in the CEQA guidelines referring to "city limits" rather than a broader conception of urbanized area, the court rejected Alameda County's use of the infill exemption for a small housing project in an area bordering Hayward that is urbanized but not incorporated. In 2006, developers YT Wong and SMI Construction filed an application with the Alameda Planning Department to merge two parcels in the unincorporated Fairview area into a single parcel of approximately two acres and then to subdivide the two-acre parcel into 12 lots. Single-family homes were proposed for each of the 12 lots. The Alameda County Planning Commission approved the development based on the exemption in CEQA Guidelines § 15332. Fairview residents Fred and D'Arcy Tomlinson argued the county should prepare an environmental review of the project, which was within a half-mile of Interstate 580, because of concern over cumulative traffic impacts. They appealed the Planning Commission decision to the Board of Supervisors. The board affirmed the approval and the Tomlinsons filed a lawsuit. The Alameda County Superior Court rejected the Tomlinsons' claims. The appellate court considered two issues: 1) whether Public Resources Code § 21177 required the Tomlinsons to exhaust their administrative remedies before filing suit; and 2) whether the project at issue qualified as in-fill development for the purposes of Guidelines § 15332. The appellate court concluded that the Tomlinsons were not required to exhaust their administrative remedies because the exhaustion requirement in Public Resources Code § 21177 does not apply to exemption determinations. In so holding, the court said its function was to interpret the statute, and the meaning of the statute affects more than just the county. The appellate court next considered the meaning of Guideline § 15332, which categorically exempts infill development if, among other things, the "proposed development occurs within city limits on a project site of no more than five acres substantially surrounded by urban uses." The Tomlinsons argued the project, proposed for the unincorporated area of Alameda County, could not qualify for the infill exemption because it was not proposed within "clearly demarcated (and commonly accepted) legal boundaries of a municipality" and thus was not "within the city limits." The county claimed the subdivision was proposed for an "established urban area" because it was in an obviously urbanized area within one-half mile of Interstate 580, and § 15332 had to be read more broadly to promote infill within urbanized areas. Reading the statute to give independent effect to both the requirement that a project occur "within city limits" and that the project be "substantially surrounded by urban uses," the appellate court found that a project had to be within established city boundaries to qualify for the exemption. The appellate court further found that the phrase "urbanized area" is defined in the CEQA guidelines, so if the secretary for resources wanted to use that phrase, he could have and would have. Instead the guidelines specify "within city limits." According to the court, this strongly suggests the secretary intended a different meaning for "within city limits." The county argued that such a narrow reading frustrated the goal of the exemption. The court however, refused to place the policy of promoting infill ahead of the explicit requirements of CEQA, finding such policy judgments are outside the purview of the court. The Case: Tomlinson v. County of Alameda , No. A125471, 2010 DJDAR 9247. Filed June 18, 2010. The Lawyers: For Tomlinson: Sabrina V. Teller, Remy, Thomas, Moose & Manley, (916) 443-2745. For the county: Manuel F. Martinez, associate county counsel, (510) 272-6700 For the developers: Richard K. Abdalah, (408) 252-5211

At a press conference at City Hall this morning Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa introduced Michael LoGrande, his nominee to success Gail Goldberg as the city's planning director. At some moments the rhetoric of the mayor and fellow speakers -- including LoGrande, City Council Member Ed Reyes, and Planning Commissioner Bill Roschen, and affordable housing activist Jackie DuPont Walker -- sounded as if they were building the world's next great city. Other times, their emphasis on customer service made the city sound more like a Nordstrom store than the writhing metropolis that it is.  The nomination of LoGrande comes a only three weeks following the announcement of Goldberg's resignation.  Goldberg had been the popular planning director in San Diego before arriving in Los Angeles and ushering what many hoped would be an era of smart growth and progressive planning in the original home of sprawl.  Though Villaraigosa said that the department conducted a national search the mayor instead dug deep into the department's existing talent pool to tap LoGrande, a 13-year department veteran who has most recently served as chief zoning administrator.   If confirmed by the Los Angeles City Council, LoGrande will become one of the only -- if not the only -- planning director in California not to hold AICP certification. Nevertheless, Villaraigosa said that LoGrande's name came up continually when stakeholders both in and outside of the department were consulted.   It's worth noting that while LoGrande had clearly braced himself for his introduction to the spotlight, the mayor has rarely looked more relaxed. Villaraigosa recently suffered a nasty bicycle accident that left his right arm in a cast, so he appeared with shirt untucked and partially unbuttoned as if he was the mayor of Key West. He joked about the need to make the city more bicycle-friendly and offered kisses in lieu of handshakes (no one took him up on that one). Hanging loose is, perhaps, a fitting attitude for a mayor who has endured his share of indiscretions and literally taken his lumps, not the least of which is the replacement of a planning director who had, four years ago, embodied his highest hopes for the city.   Not surprisingly, much of Villaraigosa's rhetoric about the city's future has remained consistent. The motto of "do real planning" has been around long enough to have gone from inspiration to albatross. Even so, the mayor today once again presented the city's challenge as that of walking a "tightrope between boundless ambition of the city's stakeholders to build a new urban paradigm…..brimming with mixed-use, transit-oriented development to create a more dynamic skyline."   At the same time, Villaraigosa introduced LoGrande as "the person most qualified to reform the department from the bottom up."  "Michael will be able to hit the ground running on the first day," said Villaraigosa. "Nobody knows the inner workings of the department, the different neighborhoods of LA, and city bureaucracy better than he does."  In brief prepared remarks, LoGrande acknowledged the convergence of architecture, urban design, and outreach but otherwise did not lay out a broad vision for planning in the city. Instead, he emphasized, transparency, collaboration, predictability, and completion of the city's 35 community plans. He praised the department's staff and expressed optimism that the department's crushing budget cuts would not impair their ability to streamline case processing and reach out to stakeholders.  "We want to show Los Angeles that we're open for business," said LoGrande. "So whether you're doing an addition to your house and need to come across the counter and talk to a planner or you have an issue with maybe a business that needs to be talked about...we're here to work with you and the other city departments to make them happen." Most notably, he will be expected to implement the city's "12 to 2" system, by which Planning will serve as a single point of contact, thus enabling developers to avoid trips to multiple city departments. This had been a goal of Goldberg, whose enthusiasm brought new public attention to the formerly low-key department. LoGrande made it clear that his first priorities would center on in-house reform.  LoGrande briefly responded to criticism that his bureaucratic background did not prepare him well for the political tumult and that his desire to create more certainty for developers would equal hasty approvals.  "People may think because of my past title as chief zoning administrator think that I'm somehow really tied into the entitlement process and the status quo, which is really far from the truth," said LoGrande. "I'm a consensus builder, I like to reach out to people."   A rough transcript of LoGrande's prepared remarks:  "I'm looking forward to collaborating with the city and various communities and stakeholders throughout los Angeles to make sure that we have a really vital planning department that looks at architecture, urban design, quality plans, and make sure that there's a contract with the community and the development community to ensure that when developers come to neighborhods, they know what to expect. They've shaped them and actually worked with the departments and the city family to make sure that we have a credible process but also an engaged process where people are informed, can roll up their sleeves and work in collaboration with the department to make sure that we grow the city for the next century." "I'm very excited for this position. One thing I'm really, really proud of is the staff we have in the planning department. We have some of the best staff in the nation. That staff is ready to engage with our neighbors and our diverse group of people we have in Los Angeles to move us forward. We have to have dialogs in various communities to see what they want to see in their neighborhoods and we have the tools inside to bring those forward."   "We've got some very, very tough budget years. A lot of the staff is on furloughs. There's been early retirement program. But we want to show Los Angeles that we're open for business. So whether you're doing an addition to your house and need to come across the counter and talk to a planner or you have an issue with maybe a business that needs to be talked about about some of the conditions they have to operate to coexist well within the community. We're here to work with you and the other city departments to make them happen." -- Josh Stephens

The day after Spain won the World Cup in Johannesburg, I met Monday with architects David Turnbull and Jane Harrison, a husband-and-wife team who put together a demonstration project at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro called "Pitch: Africa." The project sounds downright prosaic: It's essentially about low-tech strategies for capturing rainwater to support impoverished farmers in Africa, who have poor access to water of any kind, let alone drinking water but great enthusiasm for soccer. (The location of the demonstration project in California may have been a nod to the local Annenberg Foundation, which sponsored Pitch Africa; the large asphalt parking lot of Berth 87 at the port allowed a large area in which to stage the project free of cost.) The conversation I had with Turnbull and Harrison--he currently teaches at Princeton, she at Columbia--was one of the most stimulating and far-ranging conversations I have had in months. "Pitch" in this context means playing field. The pitch is a small, temporary soccer stadium, elevated about 10 feet off the ground, with conventional bleachers on either side. The smaller-than-regulation size soccer field measures about 80 by 64 feet. The size of the stadium is meant to reflect the dimensions of the water-collection tank housed beneath the playing field. (The current construction was actually a scale model of a proposed soccer field-plus-water collection and purification plant in Africa, which could hold  1 million liters of water.) The choice of a soccer stadium hints at the designers' concerns about making the water collection system compatible with existing structures. In the loose-knit urbanism of rural, agrarian Africa, a soccer field makes a good fit in a market area, without introducing any foreign-looking infrastructure into traditional contexts.  The playing surface is floored in permeable plastic tiles that allow water to percolate to the holding tank below. The reservoir gravity-feeds the water to a group of five-gallon tanks containing sand located directly beneath it. With the help of several other low-tech filtering devices, the rainwater can be made fit to drink. One of the many extraordinary gadgets, which can be virtually anywhere in the world with native materials is a filter made of clay and sawdust (!). When fired in a kiln, the sawdust burns away, leaving a very fine system of pores throughout the clay matrix; some of the pores are small enough to sift out potentially lethal contaminants, such as E. coli bacteria. Another clever clay gadget is a bowl glazed on one side only; the water in the bowl is attracted to the porous, non-glazed side of the bowl, which induces evaporation, cooling the walls of the clay pot along with the water inside it. A related clay gadget is a primitive refrigerator, that consists essentially of two or more clay vessels, one nested inside the other like babushka dolls. This device creates a multiple cycle of evaporative cooling, that can keep food fresh for a day or two. Granted, Africa probably needs these technologies more acutely as anyplace else. But the simplicity and cheapness of this technology (simple in its outcome, that is, not in the underlying research) has meaning for us in California. Los Angeles County has proposed an ordinance for all households and businesses to capture their storm runoff. Business interests have predictably pushed back against the proposed regs, claiming that capturing runoff would add an onerous cost to small business. Turnbull's and Harrison's demonstration project shows how an unintrusive, inexpensive technology can help Los Angeles County, which, like many places in sub-Saharan Africa, has adequate rainfall but captures almost none of it.  How, then, to incorporate the water works in a way that will not make the filtering apparatus one more piece of clunky, anti-social, neighborhood-destroying infrastructure? Well, hide it inside of public buildings, schools, hospitals. Or build a soccer field next to the traditional marketplace, so people can collect drinking water in 1 gallon jugs, rather than walk 25 miles, in some cases, to the nearest drinking water. Provision of water is thus an urban planning issue that can be sensitive to local culture and context.   The availability of water where previous unavailable can also have a huge impact on education in Africa. One example: the ready availability of water for personal hygiene would make it possible for adolescent girls to attend school. (Because of the lack of toilets and water, girls often must skip school when they menstruate – if they go at all.) So water is a feminist issue too. In addition, all of us by now are aware that rivers that supply water to entire nations are diminishing, while population continues to spike worldwide. I believe that our children will witness resource wars, including wars over the mountains (i.e. Himalayas) that provide the headwaters for important rivers. So providing a new source of water becomes a geo-political issue, as well. To say I was inspired would be overly mild. I was radicalized. To hell with "star-chitects." This is what architects should be doing: Using design skills to solve real problems. Amen, and pass the potable water. Here's a video of the demonstration project.  Annenberg Foundation Pitch:Africa page . --Morris Newman

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is reportedly set to announce his selection of Michael LoGrande as the city's next planning director. A 13-year veteran of the department, LoGrande currently serves as its chief zoning administrator. He replaces Gail Goldberg, who had served as planning director for four years before announcing her retirement three weeks ago.  LoGrande's path to the directorship contrasts with that of Goldberg, who arrived in 2005 to a department far different from the one she is leaving. LoGrande has spent more of his career at the department and rose up the internal ranks via the relatively low-profile office of zoning administration. Goldberg went to planning school relatively late in her professional life but quickly rose up the ranks in the San Diego Planning Department to become its director. She was appointed much fanfare in the midst of the mid-2000s real estate boom, and she immediately pledged to revamp the city's numerous community plans and to support Villaraigosa's vision for a more dense, more livable city. Many of those ambitions were hampered by severe budget cuts and an entrenched bureaucratic structure that Goldberg inherited. The debate surrounding Goldberg's replacement was whether he or she would attempt to revive Goldberg's desire to "do real planning" or whether case processing and internal reorganization would take precedence.  LoGrande now takes over a department that has been depleted by layoffs and early retirement and that has been the subject of a recent scathing city audit that faulted the department for not implementing reforms quickly enough. In particular, the planned "12 to 2" streamlining program, in which the Planning Department would handle approvals that used to require the attention of ten other city departments, remains to be fully implemented.  Villaraigosa will make a formal announcement of LoGrande's selection on Monday. He must still be confirmed by the City Council.  -- Josh Stephens

Some thoughts on the LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne's r ather brutal drubbing of the recently completed Robert F. Kennedy Education Center (three schools encompassing K-12) on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel near downtown Los Angeles. Hawthorne contends that the Los Angeles Unified School District has given the city the worst of both worlds. The new school complex tries to preserve some of the most historic aspects of the old hotel, which had been empty and closed for more than 15 years following the Northridge earthquake of 1994. After a bitter battle with preservationists, LAUSD's decision-which was handed on to its architects-was to preserve certain historic aspects of the hotel, while demolishing others. The constraints imposed by the preservation project, in turn, held back the new project from being something original and impressive, according to Hawthorne. So, in Hawthorne's assessment, the new project is successful neither as preservation nor as a new, stand-alone project. I can see his point about preservation, but I think he is beating up the school complex (and by extension the district and its architects, Gonzalez Goodale Architects) needlessly to make his point. Hawthorne's argument is strongest on the hodge-podge approach to preservation. In an analysis I wrote for CP&DR a few months ago, I praised the approach for preserving most important urban design aspect of the original hotel: The deep Wilshire Green front lawn of the hotel shored up the four-story fa-ade of the new high school, which closely follows the dimensions of the original hotel fa-ade.  Inside, a coffee shop by Paul Williams has been turned into a teacher's lounge, while the original Cocoanut Grove nightclub has been restored to something close to its 1940s appearance. More importantly, the school provides hillside views and green spaces to students in a neighborhood with very little open space. This campus is a pleasant place to be for 4,200 school children who were formerly bused out of the neighborhood. As a placeholder for the memory of the Ambassador Hotel, the RFK Education Center probably falls short. It's not really a preservation project, but a brand-new structure that, for better or worse, wants to make a gesture toward the past. If Hawthorne thinks that the gesture is half-hearted and unsuccessful, that's his privilege. If we examine the school outside of preservation issues, however, the RFK Education Center is a handsome, utilitarian group of buildings. Although not a masterpiece, it symbolizes the positive force of public investment in a poor neighborhood, and provides good-looking elevations on all four sides.  True, the glamour is gone and another piece of LA history has largely vanished. That said, a living school campus is better than a dead hotel. --Morris Newman Editor's note: Correction appended.

California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George is probably most widely known for his 2008 majority opinion striking down the state's prohibition on same-sex marriages, and for his 2009 opinion begrudgingly upholding voters' ability to ban same-sex marriage and effectively reverse the court's earlier ruling. But in land use planning and development circles, George's legacy is one of centrism and consensus. Time and again, George has corralled all of his colleagues into unanimous decisions on sticky land use regulatory issues. In light of George's announcement last week that he will not seek re-election this November, a quick review of the George court's land use decisions is in order. In 2003, a state appellate court ruled that the method of choosing Coastal Commission members was constitutionally flawed because members appointed by the Assembly and Senate served at-will terms of office. The ruling had the potential to devastate the c`ommission's ongoing regulatory activities. State lawmakers responded by changing the system to provide their appointees with fixed four-year terms. The state Supreme Court in Marine Forests Soc'y v. California Coastal Comm'n , 36 Cal. 4th 1 (2005) overturned the appellate panel's decision. Although the high court questioned the original, at-will terms for appointees, the court focused its ruling on the amended, fixed-term appointments. The new version was just fine, the court determined. What's more, George went out of his way in his opinion to confirm the legitimacy of past Coastal Commission decisions. George's decision angered property rights activists who had battled the Commission for decades, but what the chief justice did was prevent chaos. A less-clear ruling could have opened the commission to all sorts of legal and administrative challenges. In 2007, the court issued a ruling for planners and, one could argue, for community control. The case involved a City of Hanford zoning regulation that prohibited most furniture sales in a planned commercial (PC) zoning district. The regulation was intended to help preserve the economic viability of downtown Hanford, which had nice collection of furniture stores in its mix of uses. A retailer located in the PC district challenged the ordinance as an unconstitutional limit on economic activity and won at the Fifth District Court of Appeal. But George led the state high court's unanimous reversal. "In the present case, it is clear that the zoning ordinance's general prohibition on the sale of furniture in the PC district — although concededly intended, at least in part, to regulate competition — was adopted to promote the legitimate public purpose of preserving the economic viability of the Hanford downtown business district, rather than to serve any impermissible private anti-competitive purpose," George wrote in Hernandez v. City of Hanford , 41 Ca. 4th 279 (2007). Again, the court headed off chaos, as the Fifth District's decision could have been used as a basis to challenge all sorts of Euclidian zoning regulation. During recent years, the state high court has taken an unprecedented interest in the fine details of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The court has issued nine CEQA decision during the past four years (including one case dealing more with timber harvest plans than CEQA), and eight of those nine decisions were by 7-0. One ruling had a single judge's concurring opinion, and one ruling brought a lone dissent. It's true the court hasn't had a real wildcard from the left or right since Janice Rogers Brown departed in 2005. Still, only through the chief justice's leadership could the seven-member court find unanimity on nearly every CEQA issue. And, taken as a whole, the CEQA decisions carve a path right down the middle. Neither environmentalists nor developers are on a big winning streak at the court. This isn't to say the George court hasn't had sharp disagreements on land use law. On issues of due process for property owners and the taking of private property, the court has often split 4-3 or 5-2 in favor of regulators, with George in the majority. In general, though, those rulings upheld the regulatory system devised by voters or legislators, and implemented by various agencies. The rulings were conservative in that they did not significantly depart from legal precedent or well-established practices. One final point: Some recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on land use matters have provided very little useful direction for planners, developers or anyone else involved. In the most recent decision, involving the rather bizarre notion of "judicial takings," it's difficult to figure out even who won. At the California Supreme Court – at least during the George years – there has been little need to parse tea leaves or ask law professors to select the winner. Decisions may be fairly narrowly drawn, but they are clear and often useful to practitioners. Let's hope such decisions keep coming under the state's next chief justice. – Paul Shigley

The Vision California modeling exercise, however meticulous in its calculation methods, still relies on a slate of assumptions that call for some vigilant critiques. Calthorpe & Associates, which devised Vision California based on previous work, have stated elsewhere that the key to the global warming crisis lies in curbing "sprawl," that pejorative term for low-density suburban development. To the extent that a large lot, single-family home with a multi-car garage represents a choice, it is in Calthorpe's view neither a preferable nor sustainable one. To gain traction in the public consciousness, the rationale for a smart growth alternative is always carefully constructed around the public policy issue  du jour . Recently, it has been about global warming. Now a plethora of research linking sprawl to the obesity crisis has provided additional ammunition to the smart growth cause, as have the economic and housing market crises. The report's greener scenarios may indeed present a multi-benefit package that can be justified on many policy grounds, but the ubiquity of smart growth as a solution to every environmental or social crisis has had the effect of diluting its intellectual credibility. When it is applied generically, smart growth becomes less an inventive response to specific problems and more of a fixed idea. The Vision California "Rapid Fire" model is intended to be used by localities as they see fit. Even so, to label the development scenarios in  Vision California  as "options" – and to imply that ever family across the state will be $6,500 richer for them – is misleading on another level, as if land use planning in California were not an utterly decentralized affair, resistant to orchestrated regional efforts. Judging from the recent defeat of California Senate Bill 1445, which would have added a mere $1 to vehicle license registration fees for SB 375 implementation this approach is still a non-starter in California. Of course, to worry over the political feasibility of a smart growth future is somewhat of an easy target. The lack of an implementation strategy is actually less troubling than some of the assumptions and claims underlying the report itself. For one, studies on the relationship between household densities and VMT have proven to be inconclusive about the VMT-reduction benefits of "compact" development. Proximity to transit may encourage less driving in some instances, but the rate of vehicle ownership does not necessarily decrease. Though the correlation between car ownership and driving is complex at best, the fact remains that some residents may commute to work via public transportation but still opt to use their cars for leisure and personal trips. If we dig deeper into report's assumptions, VMT reduction is premised upon "increased transit service and/or new … development" in transit-oriented districts. This, in turn, requires additional infrastructure.  On this point, the report claims that the costs of urban infill (in terms of infrastructure) are significantly less than those of greenfield development, based on the "efficiencies of providing service to higher concentrations of jobs and housing." In reality, the retrofitting of sewer/water systems and the construction of new transit/road systems necessary to accommodate smart growth levels of densification can be extremely expensive. Moreover, the report focuses only on the capital costs of infrastructure and "does not yet analyze the costs for operations and maintenance." As any urban planner knows, the cumulative ongoing costs to local cities and agencies of operating and maintaining a transit system can very well exceed the original capital costs, even in present value (discounted) terms. This omission in the infrastructure cost comparison skews the results decidedly in favor of urban infill in this initial report. Project officials say that future generations of the Vision California modeling tool will account for these operational costs – and many other factors – so planners should keep a close eye on those numbers. The Smart Growth coalition has made for some strange bedfellows. Environmentalists are excited about the potential to preserve land and consume less. Developers like the concept of higher densities, as long as market prices can support them. The investment in transportation and infrastructure needed to support TOD is by definition capital-intensive, ensuring a steady supply of lucrative contracts for the construction and financial services sectors, especially with the burgeoning trend toward public-private partnerships. This alliance has come together in the Vision California report, with the CHSRA leading the charge for an 800-mile, high-speed intercity passenger rail corridor stretching from Sacramento to San Diego. In light of that project's estimated $42 billion price tag, we can only hope that Vision California is right – that the benefits of Smart Growth and transit-oriented development are rich enough to justify the enormous costs of building the infrastructure required for a Green Future. Adam Christian is an urban planner and is currently working on LA Metro's public-private partnership program.  He is the author of a 2009 Harvard Kennedy School case study on California High-Speed Rail.

Of the many raps on urban planning post-World War II, one of the biggest was that it was led by the head and not by the heart. Engineers made precise calculations that yielded efficient highways but not much by way of soul. Though that trend has largely been abandoned, the release of a new, ambitious study may usher in a new approach to empirically based planning.  The Vision California project attempts to assess the stakes of different growth scenarios that may develop across California by 2050. Commissioned jointly by the California High Speed Rail Authority and the state Strategic Growth Council and created by the Berkeley planning firm of Calthorpe & Associates, the $1.5-million first phase of Vision California estimates dollar value of potential growth patterns – most notably, the compact development promoted by SB 375 . In its broadest strokes, Vision California's model suggests that, over the next 40 years, a deliberately compact development pattern will consume only 1,800 square miles of land instead of 5,400 and will save individual households up to $6,400 annually in 2050. It also compares a cumulative infrastructure investment of $183 billion versus one of more than double that amount under the status quo. That is according to the most optimistic of the four growth scenarios that the report presents. Those scenarios range from a "business-as-usual" approach to a "green future," which assumes that a combination of policy interventions and trends have spurred compact development statewide. The report also predicts related outcomes such as greenhouse gas emissions, transportation costs per household, and residential energy use. It does not, however, estimate the cost of maintaining infrastructure or of operating transit. These conclusions are similar to conclusions of similar regional studies done by Calthorpe and others in Portland, Salt Lake City, and other western metros over the past decade. These calculations come from Vision California's "Rapid Fire" modeling tool, a spreadsheet-based calculator that enables planners to plug in relevant data for their localities and calculate the costs associated with a range of possible land use decisions. The Vision California model is intended to go beyond the regional boundaries of blueprint planning and instead provide information on statewide growth scenarios including, but not limited to, those that surround the stations of the state's proposed high speed rail network. In unveiling the model, planners essentially treated the entire state as a single scenario, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. The project's ambitious scope may carry with it inherent uncertainties. (See sidebar "Vision California: Science or Value Judgment?" ) "They are very, very difficult to model with any degree of certainty particularly over extended periods of time," said Richard Lyon, vice president for governmental affairs at the California Building Industry Association. "They certainly can provide kind of a pedagogic exercise....but in the end these systems modify themselves and they are in many cases incapable of being modeled with any degree."  Despite the variables, Vision California and the Rapid Fire spreadsheet tool, however, are designed to inspired dialog among planning agencies and across regions. The partnership between HSRA and SCG arose a year-and-a-half ago, when HSRA had already commissioned Calthorpe to design a model to help guide development around potential stations on the state's proposed 600-mile high speed rail network. At the time, SCG was also interested in developing tools that localities could use in order to assess the value of collaborative and regional land use planning.  "Vision California started off as more of a mode-centric -- in this case high speed rail effort -- but the same principle needed to be applied multimodal and across the geographic boundaries of the state," said Gregg Albright, Deputy Secretary for Environmental Policy & Integration at the California Business, Transportation & Housing Agency. Albright is a member of SCG's multi-agency team.  "Fifty years ago those weren't built to do what they're asked to do….they were built initially to design roadways," said Joe DiStefano, project lead. "We've set out to build a model that can hopefully see through some of the differences in the models and provide a common framework, if you will, for reviewing or assessing how varying regions and the state as a whole would perform under varying land use scenarios."  The next generation of Rapid Fire modeling tool that the Vision California team will be developing over the next year or so will be map-based. It will allow planners to visualize the effects of different land use patterns as they appear in the built environment, rather than as a gross number on a spreadsheet.  In many ways, the modeling suggests benefits that will accrue to localities as a result of efforts to implement AB 32 and SB 375. But the "green future" scenario would likely require the state, regions, and localities to go above and beyond the incentives and regulations that accompany those laws.  "We're trying to contextualize what has become a climate change debate and hopefully informing a deeper understanding...that it's not just about climate change. It's about costs, it's about energy, it's about public health," said DiStefano.  "SB 732 made it clear that the Strategic Growth Council needs to look for ways to provide information -- modeling, data -- to help local decision-making," said Albright, referring to the 2008 law that gave rise to the SGC. "What can we do to equip and empower localities to help them recognize they don't have to be fearful of these (policies) coming down from the state."  Although the report largely confirms the "double-bottom-line" economic and environmental benefits that planners and environmentalists have long touted regarding smart growth, even the suggestion that a single model could capture all the complexities of regional land use strikes some as hubristic.  San Diego County Supervisor and Air Resources Board Member Ron Roberts said shortly after the report's release in late June that ARB staff members were already citing its conclusions without offering much by way of context.  "I thought that was a pretty preposterous number, and it turns out that that number is their expectation in the year 2050," said Roberts. "I thought for our staff to just throw it out there ...was misleading.  What you're going to save in 2050 just is not of much interest to me." "I think when we draw figures like that it's an attempt to overhype the benefits, and that concerns me because I think ultimately that calls into question any legitimacy that there is for the concept," added Roberts.  Moreover, even if the results of the Rapid Fire model are internally valid, their applicability to the real world remains hazy for some.  Lyon, of the CBIA, said that the biggest variable that the model may not be able to capture is simply the preferences of California residents. Lyon said that many homeowners decide where to live primarily according to safety and decent schools – regardless of how much they could save by living in a green neighorhood. "That's the challenge: to address issues of safety, schools, that's where they need to focus their time and attention," said Lyon. "Any notion that government or state government or modeling scenarios is going to somehow transform development patterns or convince people to move back to urban areas is fanciful." The report's authors contend that the Rapid Fire model employs peer-reviewed assumptions and metrics regarding the dollar value of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, fuel, building energy, land consumption, and infrastructure. The goal, they say, is not to replace traditional fine-grain transportation models but rather to provide broad analyses. This would allow planners to compare the outcomes of different scenarios at almost any scale, from the neighborhood to the region.  Despite the dramatic difference in developed land between the two scenarios, DiStefano cautioned that "we would not become Manhattan." He suggested that the "green future" scenario might instead resemble the mixed use community of 10,000 residents that has been developed on 4,700 acres at the site of Denver's former Stapleton Airport.  "For the most part the greener scenarios….the majority of development does not occur in tall multifamily developments," said DiStefano. "The benefits that we see are simply in a more compact version of what people are used to today….organized in a way that allows people to walk and bike, and take shorter drives."  Though the results of this initial would seem to provide unequivocal endorsement of compact planning and heightened investment in transit and other alternative forms of transportation, its authors are quick to note that the report and any subsequent calculations using the Rapid Fire model are intended solely to provide local officials with food for thought and perhaps reveal costs and benefits that were heretofore invisible. They are not intended to drive policy in a particular direction. "I don't think it stands for any particular way of making decisions or looking at decisions," said Bryant. "It's a tool that will develop that will allow …planners and anyone interested to plug in their own information and their own assumptions and draw their own conclusions on decisions they're making." Vision California indicates that the public sector would be plugging in a tremendous amount of money to facilitate more compact development. However, it also implies that the relative benefits of transit investments – as well as savings in fuel and other auto-oriented costs – far outweigh those of, for instance, highways. "It's not an issue of cost. You're going to grow one way or another. If you grow in this way…you're not changing how we are; you're changing how you're going to grow," said Leavitt. "That would be there either way. In order to grow you either build additional freeways or you build in ways that reduce subdivisions."  Leavitt said, however, that realizing the green future scenario does not necessarily depend on build-out of the estimated $40 billion high speed rail system.  Ultimately, the benefits of even the relatively modest investment in Vision California may be elusive. Whatever dollar value the model assigns to compact development, ultimately this may be one trend that has already taken root.  "I don't think we need Vision California telling us about smart growth," said Roberts, the San Diego supervisor. "I think the local communities get it with respect to smart growth – it's apple pie and motherhood. There aren't that many people who are proponents of stupid growth."   Contacts & Resources:  Vision California Official Site  R. Gregg Albright, Deputy Secretary for Environmental Policy & Integration; Business, Transportation & Housing Agency, (916) 324-7502  Cynthia Bryant, Chair, Strategic Growth Council ; Director, Office of Planning & Research, (916) 322-2318 Joe DiStefano, Project Lead, Calthorpe & Assoc. , (510) 548-6800  Dan Leavitt, Deputy Director, California High Speed Rail Authority , (916) 324-1541 Richard Lyon, Vice President for Governmental Affairs, California Building Industry Association, (916) 443-7933 Ron Roberts, Supervisor, San Diego County, (619) 531-5544