A state appellate court has found that a provision of the Palo Alto municipal code requiring a 60-day delay prior to the issuance of a demolition permit did not render the permit approval a discretionary act requiring environmental review. The city properly treated the demolition permit as ministerial and exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the Sixth District Court of Appeal ruled.

A Santa Monica apartment complex owned by a religious group did not fall within a statutory exemption from local historic preservation regulations because the property has always been a commercial enterprise, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled.

An environmental impact report for a 560-housing unit specific plan in the Riverside County city of Beaumont has been upheld by the Fourth District Court of Appeal. The court approved the city's use of a baseline for examining water usage that was favorable to the developer, accepted the city's determination that loss of farmland could not be mitigated, and upheld the city's statement of overriding consideration for approving a project with significant environmental impacts.

A program intended to preserve farmland, adopted pursuant to the county's general plan, has been upheld as reasonably related to adverse impacts of residential development on agricultural land by the Fifth District Court of Appeal. In addition, the unanimous three-judge appellate panel ruled the program is not in conflict with a state law prohibiting a local agency from conditioning the issuance of land use approvals on the granting of conservation easements.

A city ordinance effectively banning tattoo parlors oversteps constitutional limits protecting freedom of expression, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

A unanimous three-judge panel struck down a City of Hermosa Beach zoning code prohibiting tattoo parlors because it violated the First Amendment. 

Although it may seem that tattoos are the provenance of modern day subcultures such as rock stars and motorcyclists, tattoos have been part of evolving culture around the globe for thousands of years, the court explained. City of Hermosa Beach, however, perceived tattoos' outlaw air and had adopted a zoning ordinance that precluded the operation of tattoo parlors.

Divine purposes do not give developers a free pass to circumvent local zoning regulations. 

The Second District Court of Appeal has ruled that Los Angeles County was entitled to a court order that prohibited a church from operating a school without a required conditional user permit.

The Sahag-Mesrob Armenian Church owns two parcels zoned R-1 (single-family residential) in the San Gabriel Valley. In May 2008, the church filed an application for a conditional use permit to operate an 800-student, K-12 school on the property. Four months later, the county received complaints that the school was operating in advance of the issuance of the conditional use permit and without California Environmental Quality Act review.

Refusing to second-guess a decision made by a public agency based on substantial evidence, the First District Court of Appeal has upheld a Sonoma County urban water management plan.

California appellate courts have recently published two opinions regarding attorney's fees in land use cases. Not surprisingly, the party that won on the merits in the first case also won attorney's fees, while, in the second case, the party that lost on the merits was not awarded attorney's fees even though the losing party argued that it deserved the fees.

The Cal Bears scored a victory in a recent legal challenge to a planned expansion of athletic facilities near the historic University of California football stadium in Berkeley.

The project opponents' playbook included a long list of California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) violations allegedly committed by the University of California (UC) Board of Regents. The blue and gold had a solid game plan. The regents used a tiered Environmental Impact Report (EIR), carrying forward relevant CEQA analysis from the first tier to a later document and providing detailed, site-specific analysis in the later tier.

In a pair of decisions issued on the same day, the Second District Court of Appeal, Division Four, has addressed the scope of permitted regulation when a mobile home park owner elects to convert a park into a residential subdivision and sell individual spaces. In cases from the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles suburb of Carson, the court ruled that local government may apply state law and local considerations to restrict mobile home park conversions.