In the Chino Valley’s on-again, off-again battle with the State of California over whether land use strategy should be determined by local officials or by Sacramento, Chino less than three months ago capitulated, agreeing to drop its opposition to allowing the state to dictate development standards and supersede local planning authority. Having unilaterally disarmed in the fight over who can regulate the construction industry in an effort to meet the governor and legislatures demands that they allow builders virtually unfettered license to construct more than 5,000 additional homes within their city limits before the decade is out, Chino municipal officials are now confronted by a recent court ruling indicating that despite their attitude of obsequious accommodation they are still out of compliance with the state’s housing creation mandate.
Traditionally in California, land use decisions have been left to local governments rather than to the state legislature of bureaucrats in the state capital. In this way, city councils or planning commissions, in consultation with city planning staffs determined the character of the development that was to take place in their individual cities and how intensely the properties in their communities were to be developed. Hanging in the balance was the question of density, or how many dwelling units were allowed to be constructed per acre, the height of buildings, the ratio of space occupied by buildings to the space occupied by unpaved ground with grass or plants growing on it, the mix of residential, commercial, industrial development and open space to be permitted in a city, along with whether apartments and condominiums should be allowed to displace single family homes. These decisions historically were left to the people who lived in the places that were to be impacted by the decisions.
Developers, as a consequence of wanting to make a profit, wanted to build as intensely as possible. By building on ever smaller lots, it could put twice or three times or four times or six times or eight times as many houses on an acre as was the case in the 1940s or 1950s or 1960s, so they could sell more houses and make more money. Some elected officials – mayors and city council members – saw no problem with that. They supported the idea of developers being able to maximize their profits. Other elected officials, however, looked at the consequences of stuffing more and more people into houses with ever smaller yards, packing them in like sardines into a can, and saw the social harm that fostered, the rapid deterioration of the property that had been developed, the way in which those who lived in apartment or tenements took less pride in renting or in ownership than did those who lived in, if not an estate, then a semi-estate in which they could enjoy some personal space, not be cramped and create an aesthetic about themselves that was good for them psychologically, socially and financially in terms of owning something of value.
In this way, each community took on, or had an opportunity to take on, a different character, ones that were slightly different or immensely different, depending upon the approach of the politicians running those cities.
There was a more sinister differentiation among cities in that in some, the application of money by those in the development community and building industry would influence the land use process. Through campaign donations or both direct and indirect bribes, project applicants were able to influence the standards enforced by city councils, planning commissions and city officials with regard to the quality of development, its density and the accompanying need to provide adequate infrastructure to moderate the impact of that development. Thus, in some cities, there was a greater emphasis on the quality of life of residents and the quality of neighborhoods than in other cities.
In many places in San Bernardino County, this came into much greater play as the region beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then even more rapidly in the 1980s transitioned out of being a semi-agricultural and partially rural environment to a topography that was to be more citified and dominated by urban elements. In rezoning property from agricultural land to other uses, local elected political and hired municipal officials had virtually unlimited autonomy in the choices they made and how aggressively that transition was to be effectuated. For the speculators who purchased former farm acreage with the intent of converting it to other purposes and the development companies they worked hand in glove with, upping the permitted intensity of use on that property was the primary factor in how great of a profit could be achieved in their efforts. Whereas in previous years – the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s and the early 1960s – an unspoken concept and standard of building single family homes on lots of a quarter acre or more predominated locally, as developers took control of the hundreds of acres upon hundreds of acres and square mile upon square mile of orange groves, lemon groves, grapefruit groves, walnut groves, poultry farms, vineyards and grazing land, they requested, importuned and pushed those in political control to allow them to deviate upward from that four houses-to-an-acre standard. The region’s municipal leadership had the option of simply resisting, insisting that the intensity of use in the neighborhoods replacing the trees, rows of grape vines and pastures match what already existed. Only initially and then rarely thereafter did they show that resolve. By the mid-1970s, many development companies, strengthened by the role their owners and corporate executives were playing in becoming major donors to the political war chests of the regions mayors and council members, had established a new standard that commonly allowed them to construct six units to the acre, followed by neighborhoods and subdvisions in which the yards grew progressively smaller and seven or eight homes were typically configured onto an acre. As had previously been the case, apartment complexes were being built, and during the last half of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, condominiums began cropping up. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the distance between homes diminished to the point where 12 houses were packed into a single acre. Yards in many places no longer existed except in the form of minimalist landscaping in front of a residence. The developers of such residential projects became fabulously wealthy, whereupon they plowed some of the money they were realizing back into political donations and payoffs to the politicians giving their projects go-ahead, clearing the way for ever denser development. By the early 2000s, there were entire neighborhoods in many cities in San Bernardino County that consisted entirely of duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, townhouses and rowhouses adjacent to apartment complexes.
Of note is that the politicians in the Chino Valley had resisted the development frenzy to a greater degree than did their counterparts in the vast majority of the rest of San Bernardino County. One factor contributing to this was that the Chino Valley has been since the 1800s a heavy agricultural area in which a rural aesthetic predominated over an urban one. Chino incorporated in 1910, the fifth of San Bernardino County’s current 24 municipalities to do so. Chino Hills is the last of San Bernardino County’s municpalities to incorporate, having done so in December 1991, a month after the Town of Yucca Valley did so. Despite their positioning at the west end of San Bernardino County, giving them closer proximity to the Greater Los Angeles urban and suburban center than much of the rest of the region’s cities, their longstanding and persistent status as agricultural communities to some degree isolated both Chino and Chino Hills from the developmental frenzy that subsumed other local jurisdictions and the politicians who headed them. The degree to which this is the case can be glimpsed in an examination of the current population densities of San Bernardino County cities.
In San Bernardino, the first of San Bernardino County’s cities to incorporate and thereby the most mature municipality in the region where the vast majority of its development took place prior to the middle of the 20th Century, prior to the mad rush toward ever more intensive and denser development, the average density of reidential neighborhoods is approximately 3, 312.12 people per square mile. This reflects the population distribution across both long established and more recently built neighborhoods within the 62.5-square mile city.
In 42.4-square mile Fontana, where the most explosive population growth in the county over the last three decades has taken place making that municipality the second most populous in the county behind San Bernardino, the average population density for the entire city of Fontana is approximately 4,838 to 4,920 people per square mile.
46.5-square mile Rancho Cucamonga, which in 1970 was unincorporated with a population well under 30,000 and a reported population of 44,600 at the time of its 1977 incorporation, underwent tremendous growth in the years after it became a city by combining the communities of Alta Loma, Cucamonga and Etiwanda. Having now reached a population of 177,825, Rancho Cucamonga has an average residential neighborhood density of 3,939.5 people per square mile.
In 29.7-square mile Chino, the average residential density of its neighborhoods is approximately 3,099.97 people per square mile, slightly more than three-fourths that of Rancho Cucamonga.
The average denisty of residential neighborhoods in 44.8-square mile Chino Hills is approximately 1,744.9 people per square mile, well under half of what it is in Rancho Ccuamonga.
Simultaneous to, and partially consequent of, the unprecedented population growth in San Bernardino County and Southern California, the entire State of California was experiencing a massive expansion in the number of people within its confines. Paralleling this was a housing crisis and a jump in homelessness. Among the reactions to this by the state’s leaders in Sacramento were strategies to increase the state’s housing stock and its affordability. This took multiple forms.
One part of governors Jerry Brown’s and Gavin Newsom’s approach was to reduce the ability of local officials to limit development, such that developers would have not only an even freer hand to build homes than they did before but an incentive for doing so. Even though many local governmental officials had already practically suspended or surrendered their land use authority to the point that they were allowing land owners, real estate speculators and developers to build high density residential projects at will, the state through legislation and executive action undercut any local jurisdictions that had hung onto the land use authority that had traditionally been their perogative to exercise.
One such manifestation of Sacramento dictating land use policy throughout the 163,696-square mile state consisted of transforming the the Regional Housing Needs Survey first created as an assessment and suggestive tool in 1969 into a cudgel by which cities were forced by mandate to clear the way for massive numbers of residential units to be allowed into their cities if, in fact, developers were prepared to build them. Another was the drafting a passage of the State Housing Crisis Act of 2019, which sought to overcome the imbalance of available housing to the need for more homes by streamlining housing development processes and enhancing tenant  protections. A third measure was Governor Newsom’s signing in September 2024 of three legislative bills into law – Assembly Bill 2533, Senate Bill 1211 and Senate Bill 1077 – which took effect on January 1, 2025, which in one swoop gave homeowners the power to double the density of their residential property by constructing on it another home or “granny flat.”
Using the housing and homeless crises as pretexts and California Government Code §65580 as a legal basis, the California Department of Housing and Community Development began using the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process, originally intended to reveal how the state’s population was most logically to be distributed into the thousands of cities and unincorporated communities throughout the state proportionally, imposed on all jurisdictions in the state, meaning counties and cities, a mandate that those entities include in their general plans and zoning codes an accommodation of the number of dwelling units specified in the assessment, meaning each city must allow the construction of at least the number of homes the state says is its share of the burden to meet housing demand statewide.
By this daring social experiment, the State of California required each municipality in the state to assist in alleviating the homelessness crisis by complying with what the California Department of Housing and Community Development deems to be each city’s housing responsibility.
Under this so-called Regional Housing Needs Allocation process, the Department of Housing and Community Development came up with the number of people projected to be in need of housing within California by certain specified dates and then entrusted to a regional planning agency in the state’s several regions the assignment of determing where within those regions that influx of population was to be housed. In this way, the Southern California Association of Governments – a joint powers authority consisting of Imperial, Riverside, San Bernardino County, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties – was responsible for crunching the Regional Housing Needs Allocation effort numbers in all of Southern California except San Diego County. The Southern California Association of Governments, also know by its acronym SCAG, determined that San Bernardino County must accommodate the construction of 138,110 new homes between October 2021 and October 2028, including 35,667 intended for very-low-income homebuyers; 21,903 for low-income homebuyers; 24,140 for moderate-income homebuyers and 56,400 for above moderate-income homebuyers.
Though the vast majority of municipal officials in California accept the state’s asserted authority in this area, up and down the state there has been protest of, and in some cases resistance to, these mandates.
The City of Huntington Beach, in the case of City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, challenged California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation law on constitutional grounds. Another 51 cities in the state joined in, filing amicus briefs in support of Huntington Beach or otherwise giving indication that they considered the state’s usurpation of local land use authority to be an overreach.
In San Bernardino County, 20 of the 24 municipalities docilely adhered to to the state mandate. Four county cities, most vociferously Chino Hills, gave indication that their officials believed the state was making demands that went beyond what was appropriate, not lonely intruding into the arena of land use authority more properly reserved for local authorities but mandating that their cities accommodate a number of homes that would be damaging to their communities.
In the case of Chino Hills, the state’s expectation was that the city welcome 3,720 more dwelling units from October 2021 to October 2029. Almost immediately, Chino Hills stood up to Sacramento, counter-proposing that instead of the 3,720 homes, it allow 1,797 units, a 52 percent reduction.
Three other city councils in San Bernardino County – those in Fontana Chino and Barstow – were brave enough to challenge the state. Barstow asked the state to cut its 1,516 house-building mandate by 58 percent to 635; Chino wanted a 49 percent cut from 6,961 to 3,564; and Fontana insisted that the 17,477 units it was being asked to accommodate was 30 percent too optimistic, requesting that its mandate be reduced to 10,563.
The state refused to talk turkey with any of those entities, and the California Department of Housing and Community Development did not budge in its demands, conveying that the government does not negotiate with scofflaws, renegades, terrorists or any entity or anybody that does not respect the rule of law. Lest anyone forget, California Government Code §65580 is the law, those city officials were warned.
In January 2022, a still-determined Chino Hills City Council, bolstered by an outpouring of resident sentiment, ventured even further down the path of resisting having to surrender land use authority within that city’s confines by adopting a local housing initiative referred to as “Neighborhood Voices” that asserted local land use and zoning laws trumped any conflicting state laws.
Over the next six months, however, developmental interests looking to construct housing subdivisions in Chino Hills, chaffing at the limitations on density, i.e., the number of units per acre to be permitted on property they had purchased or had tied up within the city, made it known that they were considering legal action against the city in which they were prepared to allege the city was denying them the right to develop that land to an intensity they were entitled to under the newfangled state law.
Guided by the advice of Planning Manager Michael Hofflinger, the city council relented and adopted the Chino Hills Sixth Cycle Housing Element and sent it to the California Department of Housing and Community Development. In that plan, the city essentially accepted, at least conceptually, the call for the construction of the 3,720 units within the city by 2029. That April, officials with the California Department of Housing and Community Development, conscious that Chino was among the 52 cities in the state who were not showing enthusiasm about the Regional Housing Needs Assessment program, let the city know that while the housing element addressed most of the state’s housing requirement, it was deficient in certain respects, those being that it fell down with regard to “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” specifically lacking detail on segregation/integration, concentrated areas of affluence, access to opportunity, disproportionate housing needs, and displacement risk; demonstrating how the Regional Housing Needs Allocation supports fair housing; and identifying and prioritizing factors that significantly contribute to segregation, racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, disparities in access to opportunity, and disproportionate housing needs. According to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, revisions were needed to respond to the requested fair housing analyses. State officials were rubbing it in, it seemed, not only dictating to the city how many homes to build, it was seeking to control the character and placement of those homes, as well.
In so many ways, cities are dependent on the state for pass-through funding, including taxes, subventions and other forms of revenue. Chino Hills officials were faced with the reality that they could stand on principle and, like Huntington Beach, roll the dice and see if they could prove that they could defy the state by trying to retain their land use authority by legal or procedural challenges. Yet, even if Chino Hill managed to win, it could lose, the state seemed to be telling its decision-makers. There were plenty of other ways Sacramento could outright deny or withhold funding from Chino Hills, or drag its feet in providing it, creating financial crises the city was ill-equipped to deal with.
Indeed, in May of this year, in adopting its new general plan, Chino Hills officials baked into that document, which it had been working on for nearly five years, hard indication it was going to comply with the state housing allocation process, and accommodate 3,729 housing units throughout the eight-year period that began was to elapse in 2029. In the same document, Chino Hills, which has the highest median income of any municipality in San Bernardino County at $127,000 annually, acknowledged that of those 3,729 housing units, 59 percent or 2,209 of them, must be “affordable housing” in which the density could reach a saturation of 30 housing units per acre.
One of the few other jurisdictions in San Bernardino County that had shown any level of resistance to the State of California and the California Department of Housing and Community Development with regard to the housing and housing density issue was Chino.
In addition to going on record in 2021 that its officials considered the mandate that their city accommodate 6,961 new dwelling units by October 2028 to be unrealistic, Chino has proven forthright on several occasions since then in expressing the view that Sacramento is being much too authoritarian and inflexible in its demands that cities in general – and Chino in particular – suspend their officials’ judgment about what type of and how much development will be of benefit to their communities.
Nevertheless, like Chino Hills, Chino abandoned protesting or resisting the state’s mandate that it be prepared to accept another 6,978 housing units within its city limits by October 2029, recognizing that the state government possessed too many apples to reward the city if it simply fell in line with what it was being told to do and that the state government also possessed a whip with which it could lash the city unmercifully if it did not do what it was ordered to do.
Earlier this year, Chino officials began once more to feel their oats. In April, in a letter signed by Mayor Eunice Ulloa, city fathers expressed to Governor Newsom the view that state government was becoming too bossy in its approach toward the housing and development issues.
“On behalf of the residents, businesses, and stakeholders of the City of Chino, I write to firmly oppose the relentless proliferation of state housing laws that have overridden local control without regard for State-certified housing plans, effectively sidelining the voices of our community and undermining years of responsible local planning,” Ulloa wrote. Noting that the city has reached a population of 95,000, Ulloa wrote, “Our progress has been shaped by our philosophy of “smart growth,” which has allowed us to retain the small-town feel that has defined our community for generations. It’s the reason why more young families are choosing our community to grow and thrive, and the decades of dutiful planning that has crafted our community into one of the most desirable cities in the Inland Empire. Since the elimination of redevelopment agencies in 2012, our City’s ability to retain local control over development has been chipped away year after year by a litany of housing bills designed to increase ministerial or by-right housing approval processes. While the City of Chino respects the pursuit of housing production amid a statewide crisis, the way forward is to work with cities to allow for growth in ways that make sense for their communities. Instead, cities have been virtually shut out of the process, and these new laws have diminished general plans, stripped away authority over local development, and left community members demanding answers from their local elected officials.”
Ulloa’s letter continued, “The Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), a distribution of housing units assigned to every California city, is an impossible number to attain that will not lead to the level of increased housing growth that it intends. The rigorous process of getting a housing element approved by the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) has left cities vulnerable to draconian penalties. Most importantly, the laws are not providing affordable housing as intended.”
Ulloa told Newsom, “Local control continues to be undermined by a slew of new bills each year. These bills override general plans, ignore local zoning and land use plans, and steadily erode the ability of residents and their local representatives to shape the future of their communities. Despite Chino’s opposition—as well as that of the League of California Cities and other municipalities statewide—we have been inundated with legislation that further limits our ability to plan for growth responsibly.”
In the letter, Ulloa referenced by inference a complex of bills passed in 2020 which allowed homeowners to build on their residential land an accessory dwelling unit and she referenced explicitly 2021’s Senate Bill 9, which allows homeowners to subdivide their lots and add up to two duplexes in most single-family neighborhoods. Accessory dwelling units, traditionally referred to as granny flats, were secondary residential units in which a family member or family members of the house on the property – usually a parent or the parents of the homeowner – would live. One of the 2020 bills – Senate Bill 13 – prohibited a local agency from imposing an owner-occupant requirement on the granny flats, meaning they could be occupied by non-family members, renters or a purchaser. This has the potential, essentially, of doubling the density in every city in California.
“This year, many onerous bills have been introduced that will impose additional state housing dictates on issues of critical local significance,” Ulloa’s letter stated. “And yet, housing prices are still spiraling out of control. It is imperative that we raise the question of how the state plans to evaluate these housing policies when the intended outcomes are currently not being achieved. As Mayor of Chino, I have heard from my constituents, as well as local officials in neighboring cities, about the effects of these new housing laws. Our communities are suffering, and Sacramento has regrettably turned a blind eye to the effects these laws have had on cities across California.”
Ulloa requested a meeting with Newsom, “so we can work together on a sustainable, reasonable process that addresses this decades-in-the-making housing crisis while keeping cities in the conversation and allowing us to grow in ways that include local discretion and public engagement.”
It does not appear that Newsom made any sort of substantive response to Ulloa’s request for engagement.
By September, Chino officials, or a majority of them on the city council, grew hyperconscious once more that the state held all, or at least most, of the cards in the high stakes game both were engaged in across the table from one another. City officials, anxious to avoid a showdown with the state, signaled Sacramento that they supported the state’s strategy of allowing the energetic construction of secondary dwelling units as a means of curing the housing crisis.
At a Chino City Council study session on September 9, municipal officials and the city council gave indication that the city was dropping any pretense of resisting the state government’s effort to straitjacket cities into accepting more intensive and denser development within residential zones.
Deputy Development Services Director Chris Corbin.
According to Corbin, the city is already supporting the construction of granny flats by waiving some development fees has and facilitating such projects that confine themselves to less than 1,000 square feet under roof and fewer than three bedrooms. The city has three sets of pre-approved design/construction plans that can be utilized by property owners or developers at no cost. at no cost to builders.
City officials gave indication that they now accept that there are growing numbers of existing homeowners who are contemplating constructing accessory dwelling units on their property.
One of the council members, Marc Lucio, went so far as to suggest that the city should sign on to a program to assist homeowners in financing the construction of granny flats if they were willing to adopt the city’s higher development standards for accessory dwelling units than those that now exist under state standards. The incentives to do this, under the plan Lucio proposed, are to consist of financial assistance with such construction efforts to be provided by the city. A further requirement, under the program, would be that the units be leased or rented at an affordable to tenants with very low, low or moderate income.
The incentives would come in the form of zero-interest or no-interest loans.
While Lucio was enthusiastic about the approach, and Mayor Ulloa was skeptical about the financing incentive idea, it appeared at that time that the city was going to accede to letting residents, if they so wished, construct secondary dwelling units on their property.
Recent developments with regard to the creative gyrations by cities, including Chino, to satisfy the State of California with regard to the Regional Housing Needs Assessment mandates, have now complicated even further than was the case previously the entire issue relating to permitting residential projects city officials are at heart against but which they are accommodating in an effort to stay on the state’s good side.
One of the workarounds that Chino officials had engaged in to satisfy the California Department of Housing and Community Development with regard to it meeting the Regional Housing Needs Assessment requirement imposed on their city was to use a so-called overlay strategy.
Since the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment law does not require that the number of houses specified in the assessment be built but merely that the city’s be prepared, through its zoning and land use policies to let those home be built if a developer undertakes such projects, cities hit upon the use of overlay zones to meet the mandate. In this way, cities would approve a residential overlay zone that would be applicable to land zoned for nonresidential use – such as property zoned commercially or industrially – if the property owner and/or developer or applicant applied to develop the property residentially. The property could yet be developed into stores or warehouses or factories, but the city being prepared for the conversion of the land use to residential made it so that it was credited with having met the requirement to allow the development of however many residential units demarked in the overlay district.
That is what the City of Chino did in the planning commission’s approval of the subdivision of 10.3 acres at the northwest corner of Euclid and Schaefer avenues into a 267-apartment residential complex on 5.1 acres, a 1.4-acre fast food restaurant site, a 1.5-acre fast food restaurant site, a 1.5-acre storage facility and a 0.7-acre 18,600-square foot retail complex with an accompanying parking lot. In processing Newport Beach-based Orbis Schaefer’s application for the project, the city cited the “mixed-use overlay” zoning that had been bestowed on the property. Consequent to the approval of the Orbis Schaefer project, Chino was credited with 267 of the 6,978 housing units it is mandated to permit to be constructed within its city limits.
The approval of the Orbis Schaefer project was an unpopular one that was roundly criticized by dozens of residents living in proximity to Euclid Avenue and Schaefer Avenue. Some of those residents charged that the city was pandering to the state at the expense of their quality of life and the livability of their neighborhood.
In the case of New Commune v. City of Redondo Beach, New Commune, a Beverly Hills-based development company, alleged Redondo Beach’s specifications for housing in its general plan violated California law by improperly using “residential overlay zones” superimposed on commercial/industrial land to meet housing goals. New Commune maintained that the underlying zoning prevented housing units in sufficient quantity to be built to meet housing needs, thus violating mandatory density and residential-use requirements the California Department of Housing and Community Development was calling for. This means, according to New Commune, that Redondo Beach was failing to provide an adequate number of realistic sites for lower-income housing.
The Second District Court of Appeal on October 10 sided with New Commune, holding that a residential overlay zone cannot be used by a city, as was the case in Redondo Beach, to meet its Regional Housing Needs Assessment requirement when the underlying zoning does not include residential development.
The Chino City Council, having accrued the enmity and hostility of the existing residents of the Euclid/Schaefer neighborhood by approving the Orbis Schaefer project by virtue of its fitting within the city’s mixed use overlay and now in danger of seeing a substantial number of the arrangements made to meet the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment mandate rendered invalid, at its Tuesday December 2 meeting voted to have the city file an amicus curiae brief in support of the City of Redondo Beach in its appeal to the California Supreme Court seeking to reverse Second District Court of Appeal decision pertaining to residential zoning overlays.
The amicus curiae or “friend of the court” brief is to be made in conjunction with the California League of Cities, the cities of Carson, Glendora, and Rancho Palos Verdes and any of the other 261 jurisdictions in California that made use of overlays in trying to meet the California Department of Housing and Community Development mandates imposed on them when they prepared the housing elements of their general plans that join in. The amicus curiae brief is to ask that the Supreme Court hear Redondo Beach’s appeal and decide the matter in a way that allows cities the option and flexibility of using overlays to plan toward meeting the requirement to build more housing.
Chino City Attorney Gred Galante, who previously was in the position of representing Chino when it was in the now-forsaken position of opposing the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s land use dictates, noted in passing that in the decision rendered in in favor of New Commune “is very much a hit to HCD [the California Department of Housing and Community Development because it basically discredits their ability, their authority in approving all of these housing elements.”
Insofar as the City of Chino has come to an accommodation with the state and the California Department of Housing and Community Development, he did not map out or even mention any strategy to use the ruling to renew the resistance to the state’s usurpation of local land use authority.
“The request before you today is to join that amicus curiae brief,” Galante said. “To that end, the California League of Cities has decided to take the lead in authoring the brief.” Galante said the city would not accrue significant costs in having his law firm review the brief before the city joins in the brief.
Accordingly, the city council voted unanimously to become a cosignatory to the brief.