Land Use

The migrant pickers are still arriving--it's nearly the peak of the morel mushroom harvest on Little Wolf burn, site of the largest forest fire in northwest Montana last year. In the Pacific Northwest and northern Rocky Mountains, edible wild mushrooms are a $44-million-a-year business. Morels, the most widely harvested edible wild mushrooms in the region, often appear after a fire. About 1.3 million pounds are harvested annually.

The Dodgers' new owners will pay $14 million per year to rent the parking lots from an entity half-owned by Frank McCourt, according to land-use documents intended to "facilitate the orderly development" of the property surrounding Dodger Stadium. The potential uses for the property include shops and restaurants, homes and offices, and another sports venue, according to documents obtained Friday by The Times. The documents also discuss the possibility of parking structures on the land.

It is a few years since Tesco, the British supermarket group, had a tricky encounter with a population of burrowing owls in California. The small endangered birds were cited in a legal challenge to the construction of a huge distribution center east of Los Angeles that now supplies Tesco's U.S. chain of Fresh & Easy grocery stores. The suit, eventually defeated, was seen as the work not of concerned owl lovers but of an informal alliance between the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and local supermarket businesses -- both threatened by Tesco's U.S. debut.

The Dodgers should be required to disclose the conditions that govern land use around Dodger Stadium, the Los Angeles Times argued in a court filing Wednesday. The Dodgers have asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for permission to file those conditions under seal, citing the "sensitive non-public commercial information" within. Attorneys for The Times argued that the Dodgers have not provided any evidence to support that claim, let alone why it should outweigh "the well-established presumption of public access to judicial records.

A federal judge in Los Angeles agreed Monday to reconsider his earlier ruling invalidating a key part of the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which requires local governments to apply the least-restrictive zoning measures against religious groups. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson raised alarms in many quarters of the religious community in June when he ruled that the federal law violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Five members of a rural land-use advisory group have been recalled by voters for their support of a proposal by the Blackwater security firm to build a 200-acre training camp 45 miles east of San Diego, election officials said Wednesday. Five people opposed to the project were elected to replace them on the Potrero community group, officials said. But a change in the membership will not necessarily influence whether the Blackwater proposal wins county approval.

The Calabasas City Council tonight will discuss amending land-use rules to clear the way for a controversial housing project in the Las Virgenes Valley. Micor Ventures had city approval to build 250 luxury homes east of Las Virgenes Road, but those plans were scotched in December when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John O'Brien ruled that the city erred.

Concerned that UCLA's long-range development plans would cause additional congestion in a crowded neighborhood, Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky has asked school officials to grant the city binding power to approve new building on the Westwood campus. In a letter to university officials released Monday, Yaroslavsky conceded that as "a state institution . . . (UCLA) is exempt from local land use regulation."

The Camarillo City Council has appointed 13 residents to a committee to study whether the city's General Plan reflects the council's goal to discourage development on existing farmland. Councilmen Stanley J. Daily and Michael Morgan selected the committee, making a special effort to choose people who are already active in civic affairs and who represent different groups in the city, Daily said.

The City Council directed the Los Angeles Planning Department on Friday to conduct hearings in the San Fernando Valley on any subdivisions proposed in the Valley. Councilman Hal Bernson proposed the change, saying it does not make sense that the advisory agency of the Planning Department has been holding all hearings downtown, even though half of the projects are in the Valley. Bernson was absent Friday, but his colleagues supported the change.

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a public investigation into whether the city of Lomita discriminated against a religious institution when its council denied an application from the Muslim community to expand the Islamic Center of South Bay. Lomita City Atty. Christi Hogin said federal investigators interviewed 13 people this week involved with the city's decision after launching an initial inquiry in June. She said that there is not "any evidence at all" of anti-Muslim sentiments in Lomita.

As Californians have crowded the state's bucolic foothills and scenic mountains with subdivisions and cabin retreats, pushing further into the combustible wild, state firefighting has become a billion-dollar enterprise. Now, with the state continuing to lurch from one fiscal crisis to another, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature are pushing back. They are requiring rural homeowners who rely on state firefighters to pay a $150 annual fee for fire-prevention services. Lawmakers are mulling over whether to revive proposed land-use restrictions that were killed just three years ago, after fierce objections from developers and local officials.

Chinese authorities Sunday blanketed volatile towns in Inner Mongolia with armed police, blocked Internet and telephone connections, and confined students to their campuses and activists to their homes in an effort to forestall protests scheduled Monday over the death of a Mongolian herder during a confrontation over land use. The killing of the herder, allegedly run over May 10 by truck drivers who were transporting coal across pastoral lands,...

Big changes are coming to Exposition Park. The Endeavour space shuttle, NASA announced last month, will be moving to the California Science Center campus -- though not to Frank Gehry's cramped 1984 Air and Space Gallery, whose future is, well, up in the air. The UCLA basketball team will take up temporary residence this fall at Welton Becket's 1959 Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, another candidate for future demolition. And a new Metro light-rail line along Exposition Boulevard, nearly complete, will knit the park into the regional transit grid even as its impact at ground level promises to be something of a disaster.

The lemon: An empty Manhattan lot surrounded by beat-up chain-link fencing. The lemonade: An urban oasis with wildflowers, wooden benches and sculptures in the middle of Manhattan. The economic downturn has littered the nation's cities with soured real estate developments ? empty lots or partly built projects that were abandoned when funding dried up. Now architects, developers and urban planner are trying to sweeten the situation with projects like the LentSpace park in downtown Manhattan.

In "Shaping the city of L.A." on July 2, The Times' editorial board declares, "Now is the time ... to streamline the land use process and make it smarter and more efficient." At the same time, it urges policymakers to "take charge" and commit to a vision for community planning. The Times cannot have its cake and eat it too. Which will it be: a streamlined process and quick approvals, or a deliberative approach to deciding the future of our city? Five years ago, when Gail Goldberg came to the Planning Department, confidence in the planning process was at an all-time low. Department underperformance had soured neighborhoods, and faith in the mayor himself had ebbed.

The City Council this week created advisory committees to study economic development in the area surrounding John Wayne Airport and along Mariners Mile on West Coast Highway. The two panels, council members said, will look closely at land-use patterns in those areas to maximize their revenue-generating efficiency and potential.

A Disney-backed ballot initiative that would essentially strip the Anaheim City Council of its authority to make land use decisions in the city's resort district apparently will still go before Anaheim voters in June. Mayor Curt Pringle asked the council to bypass the ballot and instead adopt the initiative outright, saving taxpayers about $250,000 in election costs. But a majority of the five-member council has indicated a desire to see the anti-housing measure remain on the June 3 ballot.

How do we want Los Angeles to grow? That's the key question the city must ask, and finally try to answer, as Planning Director Gail Goldberg prepares to retire and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa searches for her successor. Too often the answer from residents is: We don't want it to grow, because it is already big enough, crowded enough, congested enough, ugly enough and sold out enough to development interests. But that resistance has not protected the city; it has merely kept us from making decisions about our future.