The clamp on local governments in California grows only tighter and tighter.

The number and detail of state mandates continues to increase. The ability to raise revenue continues to decrease. The amount of litigation never decreases. Redevelopment is in doubt. Keeping a city or county out of financial or legal trouble seems to get more difficult every year.

Those were the implicit – and sometimes explicit – messages during the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference in Los Angeles last Friday. As always at the conference, expert practitioners and analysts reviewed last year's lawmaking, rulemaking and courtroom activity, and speculated about the year ahead. It was difficult to detect many rays of light for cities or counties.

While redevelopment might once have been considered a key weapon in the War on Poverty, redevelopment officials now find themselves gearing up for a different kind of battle. They rallied the troops today, laying out a strategy for opposing the elimination of redevelopment in order to help close a $24 billion budget gap. 

When Proposition 84 passed in 2006, it reflected a booming economy. Providing $5.4 billion for clean water, parks, and open space the measure was seen as an important way to protect the state's natural resources at a time before many were worried about $28 billion deficits or maxing out the state's bonding capacity. 

Prop. 84's primary focus is on waterways and water management. However, it also includes a relatively tiny set-aside for innovative planning that is proving to be a godsend to planning departments that are suffering unprecedented budget cuts (see CP&DR Insight Vol. 25, No. 5, March 2010). 

When organizers of the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference sponsored sessions on ethics in previous years, yawns and frequent checking of cell phones was the overwhelming response.

They expect a far more engaged audience this year for the session titled "Unringing the Bell: When Land Use Decision Making and Ethics Collide."

The dissolution of redevelopment agencies may be the biggest bombshell that Gov. Jerry Brown dropped on the land use community. But it is not the only one. He is also targeting the Williamson Act, Enterprise Zones, and fire safety in order to help close the state's $28 billion deficit. 

Enterprise Zones

Like redevelopment project areas, Enterprise Zones are intended to stoke economic development in disadvantaged areas. However, rather than using tax increment financing and being orchestrated by a public agency, Enterprise Zones simply confer tax credits and other financial incentives on businesses that set up shop within the zones. 

As expected, the budget proposed today by Gov. Jerry Brown calls for the wholesale elimination of redevelopment agencies.  This dramatic move would free up roughly $5 billion in annual tax increments that redevelopment agencies control and would redirect those increments to fund a range of local services. 

The proposal has set off what will likely be an ongoing debate over the value of redevelopment as it has been implemented in the 59 years since California voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the use of tax increment financing to combat blight. 

In Year Three of the Great Recession, it's comforting to think that California has heard all the bad news it's going to hear. Or at least we're so accustomed to bad news, that we've stopped getting depressed by it. As a result, many of this year's top stories come with silver linings.

The no-growth vs. slow-growth vs. build-everything debate has become a faint murmur, since not much of anything is getting built anyway. What is getting built, though, is generally pleasing to the smart growth crowd.

Fans of infrastructure development have surely cheered the progress on projects like High Speed Rail and Los Angeles Metro's 30/10 Initiative. Then again, skeptics may be assuring themselves that these projects will never get built.

Twenty years from now, while we scoot up and down the state on 200 mph trains, we could look back on the current "train to nowhere" episode and laugh at the furor over the project's starting point.

Or, twenty years from now, as we crawl up and down Interstate 5 and Highway 99 in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we could look back on the "train to nowhere" episode and cry over a decision that killed high-speed rail's chance of ever succeeding.

Or, twenty years from now, we may simply look back at the "train to nowhere" episode and smile, comfortable that we never sent tens of billions of dollars down that rat hole.

With the advent of AB 32 and SB 375, California has adopted some of the world's leading anti-greenhouse gas laws. And yet, even according to conservative projections, certain very low-lying coastal areas may not survive.

Some of the state's most vulnerable land rings the San Francisco Bay, which is becoming a battleground in the latest round of climate change policy debates. 

When voters emerge from the ballot box in California, you never know what the consequences are going to be.