From Permits to Penalties: A Deep Dive Into Coastal Development Law
Navigating Environmental Restrictions on Alternative Project Delivery for Complex Infrastructure Projects
On-Demand Webinar | Charting a Course for Offshore Wind Energy in California
[WEBINAR] Update on the California Environmental Quality Act: What’s New for 2018
[WEBINAR] Building a Solar Energy Project in 2018
How Trump's Infrastructure Plan Impacts the Energy Industry
BB&K's Charity Schiller Discusses CEQA Baseline
Welcome to “CEQA News You Can Use,” a quarterly production of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP’s Natural Resources lawyers. This publication provides quick, useful bites of CEQA news, which we hope can be a resource for...more
In a partially published 102-page opinion filed June 26, 2025, the Second District Court of Appeal (Div. 7) resolved cross-appeals by affirming the trial court’s judgment invalidating Los Angeles County’s 2019 EIR...more
In the summer of 2024, the State Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform began convening public hearings, interviews, and forums to understand how to reform land use permitting to address California’s ongoing “housing...more
On February 13, 2025, the Second District Court of Appeal (Div. 7) filed its 71-page published opinion affirming the trial court’s judgment rejecting CEQA safety hazard and cumulative impacts analysis challenges – as well as...more
Los Angeles County - Executive Order Streamlines Path to Rebuild Homes, Businesses, and Communities Destroyed by Los Angeles Firestorms - In response to the multiple firestorms in Los Angeles County that started on January 7,...more
On November 22, 2024, the First District Court of Appeal’s (Div. 4) partially-published opinion in People of the State of California ex rel. Bonta v. County of Lake (Lotusland Investment Holdings, Inc., et al. Real Parties in...more
The court upheld a mitigated negative declaration for a parcel delivery warehouse project, finding, among other things, that the threshold of significance and baseline used in preparing the MND were supported by substantial...more
In its decision in Upland Community First v. City of Upland, the Fourth District Court of Appeal upheld a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) for the development of a warehouse and parcel delivery service building against a...more
In its recent decision in Hilltop Group Inc. v. County of San Diego, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal issued a number of holdings that resulted in a strong ruling in support of streamlined environmental review for...more
2023 served up roughly the same number of published appellate CEQA cases as 2022 with a defense win percentage of over 80 percent, which has been the case in many, if not all, of the past ten years. A prominent theme of...more
City of Los Angeles - The Processes and Procedures Ordinance Becomes Operative January 22, 2024 - The city council adopted the Processes and Procedures Ordinance amending the Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) to...more
On July 10, 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a package of bills intended to accelerate critical infrastructure projects across the State aimed at achieving monumental climate and clean energy goals while...more
The City of Irvine violated CEQA by approving a development project based on an addendum to a program EIR containing insufficient information regarding the project’s greenhouse gas emissions and by relying on CEQA’s Class 32...more
The EIR for a bottling plant in Siskiyou County withstood challenges to the project description and impacts analysis, but the EIR’s stated project objectives were unreasonably narrow and the County should have recirculated...more
On April 20, 2022, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) adopted new recommended thresholds for determining the significance of individual projects’ greenhouse gas impacts under the California Environmental...more