A developer building a housing development on the site of the closed Fort Ord Army post in Monterey County was required to pay prevailing wages to construction workers, a state appellate court has ruled.

The California Court of Appeal, Sixth District, held that deeds for property acquired from the City of Marina Redevelopment Agency required the purchaser/developer to pay prevailing wages to construction workers, because the deeds incorporated a master resolution that explicitly mandates payment of prevailing wages. 

In addition, the appellate court ruled that the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit were entitled to $73,167.50 in attorney's fees.

An appellate court has blocked a proposed Santa Barbara housing subdivision because the city did not receive of voter approval of an access road and bridge on city-owned open space land, as required by a 1982 initiative. 

In the 100 years since the initiative and referendum powers have become part of the local land use planning and development legal framework, voters have used these populist elements of democracy to shape growth. The case from the City of Santa Barbara illustrates a variation on the intersection of planning and voter control. 

A lawsuit challenging Sonoma County's ordinance regulating the location and operation of medical marijuana dispensaries has been dismissed because it was not brought within the 90-day statute of limitations.

The California Supreme Court will review a case in which Alameda County and a housing developer argue that a California Environmental Quality Act lawsuit filed by project opponents should have been dismissed because the opponents did not raise their objection during the administrative process.

An 11-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has thrown out the court's 2009 decision that invalidated the City of Goleta's mobile home rent control ordinance. This time, the court ruled the ordinance was not an unconstitutional taking of property because the mobile home park owners who brought the challenge acquired the property long after ordinance was in effect. 

The Second District Court of Appeal has upheld a determination by the Department of Industrial Relations that required public improvements in a master planned community project to abide by prevailing wage laws. The court further ruled that Mello-Roos proceeds are "public funds," and that once a project is deemed a "public work" under the Prevailing Wage Law, all public portions of the project are subject to the law – including those public improvements that are privately financed.

The parts of a Kern county mining project are decidedly not greater than – or a substitute for – the whole, as far as the California Environmental Quality Act is concerned. 

The Town of Mammoth Lakes has been ordered to pay more than $32 million for violating a development agreement.

In upholding a jury's award of damages to the developer, the Third District Court of Appeal made clear that local government agencies are treated like any other private contracting party when it comes to development agreements and can be held liable for damages if the agency breaches the agreement.

The City of Sunnyvale's analysis of a road improvement project's traffic and related impacts based on predicted conditions in 2020 violated the California Environmental Quality Act's requirement to compare a proposed project with existing conditions.

A case involving the relationship of the Subdivision Map Act with the Coastal Act and Mello Act has been accepted for review by the state Supreme Court.