Blogs

Before we pay our last respects to the latest statewide water bond, could we at least let the voters put the nail in its coffin?

Gov. Schwarzenegger recently announced he would work with the Legislature to pull Proposition 18 – the $11.1 billion water bond – from the November ballot and instead place the measure on a 2012 ballot. State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said he would cooperate.

A bill that would permit a lawsuit challenging a housing element to be filed at almost any time advanced through a state Senate committee earlier this week and is headed to the Senate floor.

Assembly Bill 602 passed the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee on a party-line vote of 6-3 vote, with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed.

Back in 2005, after Con Howe stepped down from his longtime role as Los Angeles's planning director, my phone kept ringing off the hook with calls from people trying to help new Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa find a new planning director. Some wanted to know who I thought would be good; others wanted to bounce candidates off of me to see what I thought.

After about the eighth call, I realized something important. There was only one person on everybody's list. Astonishing, given the typical biography of a big-city planning director at the time, she was 62-year-old woman from San Diego who hadn't even been a professional planner until the late 1980s. And so it was almost preordained that Villaraigosa was going to pick Gail Goldberg as his planning director.

Read Bill Fulton's appreciation of Gail Goldberg's time in Los Angeles here.

After four-and-a-half years at the helm of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Gail Goldberg has announced her retirement. In a letter [pdf] to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Goldberg, who arrived in Los Angeles after serving as planning director for the City of San Diego, cited major initiatives that she had championed at the department but wrote that ultimately she has "been long ready for retirement and new adventures." 

The California Air Resources Board has released very cursory greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets for the state's 18 metropolitan planning organizations.

Although draft greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions targets under SB 375 are due June 30, detailed targets will not be proposed until August. The targets, scheduled for final adoption in September, are intended to guide sustainable communities strategies that the MPOs must adopt during coming years. 

Pitting affordable housing advocates against local government officials, planners, and builders, a housing element bill has seemingly risen from the dead to become one of the hottest land use bills in Sacramento.

Assembly Bill 602 would provide an unlimited time period during which someone could sue over a jurisdiction's housing element, which is intended to demonstrate how a city or county will provide its fair share of housing at various cost levels. According to the affordable housing advocates supporting the legislation, a 2008 Court of Appeal decision placed a 90-day statute of limitations on legal challenges to housing elements. The bill would permit lawsuits at any point during the housing element planning period.

Some people are, lamentably, forced to live in substandard housing. They languish in stark Modernist buildings that are often segregated from the proverbial hustle and bustle of the city. They enjoy no amenities and they have a hard time making a living, even with public assistance, so they ask for more public assistance to give them the environment they need to prosper. 

2010 Summer and Fall UCLA Extension Public Policy Courses

The UCLA Extension Public Policy Program has now released its listing of courses for Fall Quarter. We encourage you to visit www.uclaextension.edu/publicpolicy for more information about the courses listed.

Online enrollment is available by visiting www.uclaextension.edu and referencing the Reg#.

Join Us!

Summer 10

• Recent Innovations in Parking Management (V7784)
Thursday, June 22
Figueroa Courtyard, Los Angeles, CA

Peter Valk, President, Transportation Management Services
Don Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA

The Legislature doesn't get credit for doing many things right these days, but lawmakers appear to be making at least one bipartisan strike for fiscal sanity.

Few definitive trends emerged in the handful of local land use ballot measures that were decided across the state yesterday. Voters in Costa Mesa, Mission Viejo, Pleasanton, Sutter Creek, and Brentwood maintained status quo with votes that either limited development or rejected new land use provisions. Meanwhile, Redlands voted to allow new big-box stores, Eastvale voted to exist as a city, and Santa Clara voted to allow and partially fund a football stadium that, when full, will add the population of a small city to the heart of Silicon Valley. 

Read on for complete results, with links to CP&DR's preview coverage:

HOLLYWOOD, June 4 -- What's that spell?!? If you're a policy wonk, public official, or real estate developer and you were within earshot of Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, then you'd darn well better know.

 HOLLYWOOD -- Speaking at the Urban Land Institute's Transit Oriented Development Summit, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) announced that the Federal Transit Administration had admitted the entire 9.3-mile stretch of Los Angeles Metro's proposed "Subway to the Sea" for preliminary engineering studies. Boxer said that the admission of the entirely bodes well for Metro's innovative "30-10" financing plan, which promises to remake the face of transit in Los Angeles within a decade.

By Morris Newman

TIPPER and AL GORE have retired for the evening. They lie supine under the covers and are wearing pajamas, each with their respective monograms on the chest pockets. 

Al: "Honey, something's been on my mind...."

Tipper: "If it's dirty, please write it down. You know I don't like to hear smutty language."

Al. (chuckling): "No, hon, nothing like that. Those fires are banked for the night. I'm just wondering if we blew enough insulation into this house."

Tipper (lecturing tone): "Albert, we have 300 cubic yards of insulation in this house. Plus we live in Tennessee, not Wasilla. It's never below 50 degrees."

AL: "I know, I know. It's just that this house is so… freakin' gi-normous. Sometimes I don't see you for days."

Tipper: "It's true. But, then again, it's not even the biggest on the block!" (coyly): "Did you miss me?"

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California, one size does not even come close to fitting all.

That's all I could conclude after the SB 375 Regional Targets Advisory Committee (RTAC) and metropolitan planning organization (MPO) representatives touched on an amazing array of policy and technical issues during an all-day meeting on Tuesday.

All right, I could also conclude that what has been a highly technical process may be on the verge of becoming very political.