To: tejek who wrote (1806 ) 7/8/2013 7:12:43 PM From: John Vosilla Read Replies (1) | Respond to some interesting comments on the SCOTUS decision doggril • 20 hours ago I'm a huge fan of smart regulations. I'm also very happy to see this ruling. I've been watching over the past couple of decades where government, natural resource departments and agencies in particular, have made demands they didn't have statutory authority to make, but made on the basis of what they'd gotten away with previously. I've seen demands that were not based on science, not consistent with their own authorizing legislation; and this ruling exposes at least one that was not consistent with the Constitution. If this causes agencies to take a step back and be a little more careful to comply with their own authorizing legislation, now that challenging them has just become much less expensive, then that's a win for the public and for public policy. Peter McFerrin KJ • 13 days ago I live in the Tri-Valley. There's an awful lot of small open spaces in places like San Ramon and east Dublin that have limited habitat value, are unimproved for recreation, and exist pretty much because someone decided that they didn't want to look at houses on a particular hill--and yet are in private ownership. The rules for development that this ruling guts are arbitrary, ad hoc, and entirely too subject to the whims of incumbent homeowners who want to restrict the supply of housing for the purpose of inflating their own property values. I would much rather that people who want to preserve a "rural feel" or what have you to take the conservancy approach, like that used very well in Livermore, and buy land (or at least the development rights to it) from landowners rather than using the state essentially to steal it from them. The argument that limiting development somehow creates a public good of the sort that only government can provide is almost always unpersuasive. I would love for it to be easier to densify, too, but when you have people in Berkeley and Palo Alto flipping out over eight-story buildings adjacent to major transit stops, it's awfully hard. Of course, this ruling removes one of the major impediments to densification in areas that have been zoned for it, so maybe we'll see a few more transit villages being built around BART and Caltrain stops.
