vested rights
A Warning to Local Planners in California
If Proposition 45 is passed, you may get blindsided by projects you cannot stop. You may want to prepare yourself.
A lot of the debates over BACA, the Cal Chamber supported initiative to fundamentally change CEQA (Proposition 45 on the ballot) focus on the initiative’s impacts on CEQA. But from a local government and planning perspective, I would argue that far more important are the sweeping vested rights provisions in the initiative. As I noted …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat does BACA do? Part III
Proposed CEQA ballot initiative would prevent changing environmental standards very early in the development process.
This is the third in a series of blog posts on the California Chamber of Commerce’s proposed ballot initiative amending the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The first blog post is here. The second blog post is here. The most sweeping change in the initiative is buried in the lead-in to an innocuously titled section, …
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CONTINUE READINGAn Oil and Gas Setback in Los Angeles Would Not Create Billions in Liability
A recent report from the Petroleum Administrator relied on incorrect and incomplete legal assumptions about the City’s potential liability to oil and gas operators. Here’s why it matters.
This week, Sean Hecht and I (in our capacity as attorneys in the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic at UCLA School of Law) sent a letter on behalf of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust to Mayor Eric Garcetti, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office, and the Los Angeles City Council. (Our letter built …
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CONTINUE READINGDonald Rumsfeld’s Tips for Law Teachers
Today in Land Use class, I had an abysmal time attempting to teach Avco v. South Coast Regional Comm’n, a 1976 California Supreme Court case that is crucial in understanding the “vested rights” doctrine. Avco holds that a developer has vested rights to develop only when 1) it relies on a permit; and 2) has …
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