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California's Supreme Court broke the Newhall Land & Farming Company's long winning streak November 30 in a victory for environmental and community groups over the Newhall Ranch megadevelopment.

If there's anything more confusing than one regional government bureaucracy, it's two regional government bureaucracies.

A new set of recommendations for implementing SB 743  - which would require traffic analysis to be based on vehicle miles traveled -- proposes moving many proposed significance thresholds from the legally binding CEQA guidelines to a technical advisory memo. These recommendations also call for stricter thresholds on the so-called "regional averages" and provide simpler methodologies for dealing with safety issues. The thresholds of significance are important because they often trigger an environmental impact  report.

Last week's unanimous, finely worded ruling by the California Supreme Court has spared builders their worst-case scenario in the long-awaited "CEQA in Reverse" case. It does not interpret the California Environmental Quality Act to require an environmental impact report whenever a project might attract more people within range of an existing hazard such as air pollution or earthquake risk.

When the redevelopment system was dismantled in 2012, redevelopment leaders around the state feared that the state Department of Finance's desire for short-term cash would force a fire-sale of redevelopment assets that would drive prices down and undermine cities' ability to complete their pending redevelopment projects.

The preservation of the Montgomery Hotel in the City of San Jose could be likened to a brick rescued from a burning house by its owners. By itself, the brick would have little or no value. As a souvenir of a vanished house, however, the brick becomes a treasured relic. That analogy might help outsiders understand the rationale behind the extraordinary labor and expense that the San Jose Redevelopment Agency has devoted to saving what is, by all accounts, a handsome but rather ordinary building. The 88-year-old Beaux Art Neoclassical building must be moved to make room for the expansion of the Fairmount Hotel. To prevent the demolition of the Montgomery, the city has decided to spend nearly $19 million, and possibly more, for the feat of moving the 130-foot-long building about 200 feet to the south. Moving structures, of course, is a time-honored method of preservation, from the statuary of Abu Simbal in Egypt to the Cape Hatteras Light House in North Carolina. Even so, moving the Montgomery is a big engineering and financial maneuver. During January, engineers removed portions of the foundation, and, in their stead, inserted squat, rubber-wheeled machines. On January 26 (we are writing this before the fact) the remaining walls were to be removed by a set of simultaneous explosions, and the entire building rolled, like some enormous lunar landing craft, to its new home. This technology has been used several times before to move buildings, but is more commonly used for moving drilling rigs, according to Sharon Jones, a project manager with the redevelopment agency. The agency will spend a total $18.7 million to move the old hotel, remove asbestos from the building, and prepare the site for construction of the Fairmount addition. The project is unorthodox by most standards of redevelopment. No developer has stepped forward to take over the building. Although the city would like the historic 143-room Montgomery to reopen one day as a luxury hostelry, critics claim that the move will make that difficult. And the previous mayor, Susan Hammer, seemed content to reduce the building to rubble. Why, then, is the Montgomery being saved? In our view, the redevelopment agency is trying to undo the damage done by urban renewal 30 years ago. Citing the above analogy, the Montgomery could be likened to the brick souvenir of the burned up house � only, in this case, it is downtown San Jose that is being remembered. Much of that downtown was destroyed during the 1960s and '70s in the name of urban renewal. Since that time, historic preservation has become a hot issue in San Jose. The redevelopment agency, which has rebuilt the downtown almost on its own, has treated the small number of surviving buildings from the original downtown as if they were masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright. And current Mayor Ron Gonzales promised in his electoral campaign to save the Montgomery, among several other buildings. Unsurprisingly, some local observers, including the San Jose Mercury News, have questioned the value of moving the Montgomery. "Will historical preservation be San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales' black hole?" asked the headline of an August 29 editorial. The article alleged that the Montgomery move would entail more money than previously publicized. According to the newspaper, the city would lose 230 parking spaces as a result of the move, which will cost local taxpayers $4.6 million to replace (assuming $20,000 per parking stall). Further, the newspaper editorial claims that the official cost of the move does not include the full cost of restoring the Montgomery, and reports that local preservationists were concerned about the move's affect on tile and moldings. And, on its new site the old hotel's lack a basement for storage, mechanical equipment and kitchens "will make its first floor very cramped indeed," according to the Mercury News. In a sense, the Montgomery move is a problem of the redevelopment's own making. Fairmount officials told me that the expansion of the luxury hotel, one of the largest downtown, was the agency's brainchild. To be sure, the agency is eager to create more hotel rooms to support the downtown convention center. (The agency is contributing $14 million toward the new construction.) Undoubtedly, the 260 hotel rooms promised in the new Fairmount wing are an asset to the meeting-and-convention trade, although the hotel is far from the only game in town; the city recently approved two new downtown hotels. That might lead some observers to conclude that market forces would have provided the hotel rooms needed for the convention center, and that the Montgomery could have stayed put and saved taxpayers $33 million. (That conclusion, however, probably does not take into account any subsidies that the agency might contribute to other hotel projects.) In this column, we sometimes have explored the conflict between two worthwhile agendas. Here, the conflicting agendas are "getting the best bang" for your redevelopment dollar, and saving historic downtown fabric. In some cities, a building of the quality of the Montgomery might disappear into a cloud of smoke, with few tears shed. And some observers might have to think long and hard about spending money to save an ordinary building that could be spent, hypothetically, on a comparable new building that would be architecturally distinguished and perhaps add more to the city than the old hotel. So, did San Jose do the right thing? After a long pause, I would say yes. True, the money spent to move the old hotel and subsidize the new one might have been spent on an all-new building, but downtown San Jose already has a number of fine new structures and needs all the historic buildings it can get. The Montgomery is part of a happy, if ironic trend in American urbanism, in which we are now scrambling to rebuild the streets and the buildings that we so casually destroyed just a few years ago. In a sense, the cost of saving the Montgomery is only a small part of the price we continue to pay for undoing urban renewal.

In 2010, the City of Santa Monica adopted a Land Use and Circulation Element to its General Plan that was hailed as a model of progressive planning. The LUCE foretold a denser but, possibly, less trafficked and more pleasant city and was one of the first such elements to achieve the goals of SB 375. Cities across the state looked to the LUCE as a model. It won "Outstanding Comprehensive Planning Award, Small Jurisdiction" from the California Chapter of the American Planning Association http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-2773 . The LUCE was designed to generate zero net new car trips in the city by 2025 and to reduce the city's annual greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 200,000 metric tons compared to 2010 levels. It also provided a bookend to the 1984 General Plan update. Back then, the city sought to increase its employment base but did not promote housing accordingly. Five years later, Santa Monica has plenty of jobs � 74,000 in a city of 92,000, with pressures increased with the recent rise of "Silicon Beach tech firms � but has taken a step back from the LUCE, eliminating a density bonus "tier" and four of five "activity centers" identified in the LUCE. And if a slow-growth group gets its way, a full repudiation of the goals of 2010 may be in the offing. The situation sets a politically sensitive table for the new city manager, urban planning legend Rick Cole, who started work on June 29. "The LUCE was basically sold to residents as a slow-growth document," said Armen Melkonians, founder of advocacy group Residocracy, which generally takes slow-growth positions. "The reality is that�.it effectuated changed in Santa Monica quite drastically and rapidly." He likened the LUCE's proponents to "snake-oil salesmen." Early this year, the City Council considered a comprehensive zoning code update intended to bring the city's code in line with the vision of the LUCE. It included three "tiers" of multifamily and mixed use development, affording developers increasing levels of density but requiring increasing levels of public scrutiny. The LUCE establishes two stories or 32 feet as the "base" in Tier 1. Tier 3, approved only through development agreements, requires developers to include community benefits, such as on- or off-site low-income units, in order to earn the right to build up to five stories or 50 feet in height. Tier 3 was designed to apply only to the city's major boulevards, notably Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Lincoln. Tier 3 was too much for many of the city's slow-growth advocates, who clamored for the down-zoning on the grounds that excessive development would infringe on neighborhood character and worsen the city's notoriously heavy traffic. The City Council voted 4-3 April 15 to eliminate that tier on Santa Monica and Wilshire, the city's two more important boulevards, as well as some of the other increased density envisioned by the LUCE. Even with this victory, slow-growth activists may yet gear up for a referendum that could force the city to rewrite the zoning code entirely. The LUCE was designed to add roughly 4,995 new housing units, well exceeding the 1,694 prescribed by the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, 974 of which are allocated as below market rate. It also envisioned five "activity centers" that would include relatively dense development and clusters of commercial establishments that residents could visit without relying on personal automobiles. Much of the LUCE's provisions respond to the advent of Phase 2 of the Expo Line light rail, which will serve three stations in Santa Monica as of next year and provide direct service to downtown Los Angeles. A separate 5-2 vote eliminated all but one of the five activity centers. Both sets of changes were confirmed, with minor amendments, upon second reading June 23. The elimination of Tier 3 would not apply to Colorado and Lincoln boulevards, or to downtown Santa Monica, which is governed by its own specific plan, currently being revised. Also, 100-percent affordable developments and adaptive reuse projects are exempt. Even with much of the LUCE still intact, critics of the down-zoning consider it an egregious retreat from progressive planning, especially in light of pro-infill policies that are being implemented statewide, such as Senate Bill 375. "There's the direct effect of the decision, and then there's the momentum that the decision signifies, said Juan Matute, co-chair of smart growth advocacy group Santa Monica Forward and associate director of the Lewis Center and the Institute for Transportation studies at UCLA. "The concern is that it's one in a series of capitulations to those who don't believe in the vision of the land use and circulation element for a progressive, sustainable SM and that this is just one in a series of decisions that will completely dismantle the LUCE's vision." Melkonians, of Residocracy, said that rampant development in Santa Monica over the past five years proves that city government cannot be trusted to manage growth. Melkonians, who is an engineer by trade, said that the LUCE's relies on faulty growth projections. He contends that many of the 10,000 or so additional residents projected by the LUCE would actually have been induced by new development. In essence, he claims that the LUCE's projections mistake cause for effect. "They failed to include any of the growth-inducing impacts of the General Plan update itself," said Melkonians. The city's population has remained relatively static over the past 45 years, having reached 88,000 in 1970. Critics of the LUCE also contend that, regardless of planning trends, conditions have changed over the past five years that make stricter growth controls more necessary.  Melkonians said that the LUCE relied on a planned subway extension, known colloquially as the "Subway to the Sea." That extension will not reach Santa Monica for decades, if ever. "There's a lot of support in the community for transit-oriented development," said Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKeown, who voted for the down-zoning. "There was, on the other hand, considerable resistance to transit-anticipatory development." That resistance was on display several months before the zoning vote when the council, amid fierce lobbying from groups such as Residocracy, voted to rescind an agreement for a major mixed-use project next to the Bergamot Station Expo stop. One other change from 2010 involves not demographics but rather a dispute between two luxury hotels just north of downtown Santa Monica. The Huntley Hotel is opposing a proposed expansion of the Miramar that might obstruct the Huntley's view of the ocean. The Huntley donated $10,000 to Residocracy. "Voices in the community that were concerned about development became amplified as a result of the Huntley Hotel's involvement," said Matute. Melkonians said that donations do not drive the group's agenda. Whatever different methods of analysis reveal, the fact remains that the region faces what many consider a monumental housing crisis. Santa Monica's high housing costs are often held up as a symbol of that crisis. "We've grown only about a half-a-percent...that's below the birth rate," said McKeown "We're not even accommodating the kids who are born here." Even the slow-growth advocates wanted to make concessions for subsidized housing�some arguing that affordable housing should be the only type of new housing approved in the city -- supporters of the LUCE counter that, especially in the absence of redevelopment monies, generous amounts of market-rate development will be necessary to create affordable units. Tier 3 projects would have been approved contingent upon development agreements, through which the city could have compelled developers to include affordable units or set aside funds to promote other types of affordable housing. As well, Tier 2 projects may not be attractive to developers, for whom an extra story could make the difference between profit and loss. "It will be harder to build four- and five-story housing, which is where the most favorable economics are for residential construction," said Matute. Those concerns are overblown, according to Santa Monica Planning Director David Martin. "The result of all of our analysis is that a Tier 2 project is still feasible," said Martin. "We expect that the four-story mixed-use projects can still be built." Overall, Martin insists that the spirit of the LUCE remains intact. "I think the underlying principles of the LUCE are still sound. I don't think this undermines it in any way," said Martin. "It's not unusual for there to be some adjustments and reductions here and there." Though he voted for the down-zoning, Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKweon said that he supports the vision of the LUCE and does not feel that the city's progressive spirit has been compromised. "What we did was to recalibrate that LUCE to accommodate what we see really happening in the next 20 years," said McKeown. "Our thinking on the zoning code was, I think, an extension of the thinking we put into the LUCE. The LUCE was a visionary plan of which we were very proud." One major element of the LUCE is the alleviation of the jobs-housing imbalance, symbolized by the nearly static river of cars that travel westbound on Interstate 10 every morning and eastbound evening. Proponents of the LUCE argue that it was designed to reduce traffic by offering housing that would be occupied by workers who currently commute into the city. "The measures that have been stricken were primarily those that would help the city cope with traffic in the future," said Matute. Melkonians rejects that theory, noting that there's no guarantee that all new Santa Monica residents will also work in the city. 2000 Census data indicates that only 32 percent of the city's residents worked in Santa Monica, with more workers commuting to Los Angeles than remaining in Santa Monica. "It's impossible that over 50 percent of (new residents) will work in Santa Monica," said Melkonians. "That's not how Southern California works." However this debate plays out in Santa Monica, it may foretell more challenges to the provision of housing and achievement of smart growth goals throughout the region. A recent report from the Legislative Analysts' Office emphasizes the need for coastal cities to allow more housing � as much as 100,000 more units annually than are currently expected to be build statewide. At the same time, the LAO acknowledged the challenges of developing in cities like Santa Monica. "Local residents are often resistant to new housing development and they'll use their local communities' land use authority to delay or block new housing development," said Brian Uhler, senior fiscal and policy analyst with the LAO, in a video released with Tuesday's report. "We see that this type of resistance is particularly heightened in California's coastal communities." Matute said that achieving these housing goals, and promoting infill development, is going to require planners around the state to become more politically savvy and more convincing in their outreach efforts. "The state, the regional, and the local plans in focusing on infill development are looking at putting a growing share of new growth in California...into existing communities," said Matute. "It requires an expanded level of community negotiation skills." Contacts and Resources Santa Monica 2010 Land Use and Circulation Element Kevin McKeown, Mayor, City of Santa Monica, kevin@mckeown.net David Martin, Planning Director, City of Santa Monica, david.martin@smgov.net Juan Matute, co-chair, Santa Monica Forward, http://www.santamonicaforward.org/ , jmatute@ucla.edu Armen Melkonians, founder, Residocracy, https://www.residocracy.org/ armen@residocracy.org

The Third District Court of Appeal has rejected several arguments that the laws eliminating redevelopment violate the California constitution.

The California Supreme Court has denied review of a case from Riverside County involving the interplay of habitat conservation planning and the California Environmental Quality Act -- and also depublished the case so it cannot be used as precedent.

With the state no longer in the dire financial circumstances that it endured several years ago, this year's budget process was, by some measures, less tense than it has been in years past. Presented in January, revised in May, and approved June 15, the budget totals approximately $123 billion, including about $5 billion from reserve funds. The details are being negotiated in a series of trailer bills that are pending.

Just before Labor Day, Rick Caruso, the savvy real estate developer from Los Angeles, used the "Tuolomne Tactic" to end-run the California Environmental Quality Act in order to get a shopping center approved in Carlsbad .

Punching a hole in the faith local governments and developers in California have placed in habitat conservation plans, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that federal wildlife agencies retain the discretion to designate additional land as critical habitat even after an HCP has been approved.