News

October 7, 2026

L.A. County CAO (fmr) David Janssen on Measure G: ‘We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know’

In 2028, Los Angeles County voters will elect the county's first executive, the centerpiece of Measure G, the charter amendment that narrowly passed in November 2024. Few people understand the job being redesigned better than David Janssen, who ran the county bureaucracy as chief administrative officer from 1996 to 2007 after 13 years in San Diego County's CAO office. TPR reached out and asked him “What problem the LA County Reform is purportedly meant to solve; whether Measure G, the skeleton reform offered, is likely to solve it; and, whether any charter reform can solve the reform challenges described.”

October 5, 2026

Portland’s Earl Blumenauer: Charter Reform’s Unintended Results  - Paralysis, Dissension & Delay 

Earl Blumenauer spent 28 years in Congress building a national reputation as the legislature’s most persistent advocate for livable cities. He came home to Portland in January 2025 to find his own city midway through the most radical governance overhaul any large American city has attempted in decades—and to find that the reform impulse he long ago helped pioneer in Oregon has begun producing results its authors did not intend. In this conversation with TPR the former congressman, now a Presidential Fellow at Portland State University’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, is unsparing about what he is watching, in Portland and well beyond it.

September 16, 2026

California’s Electric Utilities Are Becoming Uninvestable

With Sacramento letting SB 492 stall and California's strict inverse condemnation doctrine still leaving utilities liable for grid-caused wildfires regardless of negligence, PG&E and Edison International face mounting pressure on their cost of capital just as the state needs major grid investment. TPR here republishes Bloomberg Opinion energy columnist Liam Denning's analysis of why California's electric utilities are becoming uninvestable, and of the reforms that could shift wildfire risk away from ratepayers and toward insurance markets. See the original publication here.

September 16, 2026

Carmelita Ramírez-Sánchez & Catherine Baltazar: Lineage Fire

This past June 17th, fire broke out at the roughly 500,000-square-foot Lineage cold storage facility on the seam between Boyle Heights and unincorporated East Los Angeles. It burned through reignitions until knockdown on June 24, prompting a number of shelter-in-place orders and emergency declarations from both Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom. TPRVX, to better understand the Impacts and response, spoke with Carmelita Ramírez-Sánchez , executive director of the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, which operates a neighborhood resilience hub, and Catherine Baltazar, associate director of advocacy and organizing at Climate Resolve. The focus is on the response, the jurisdictional gaps it exposed, and why implementation, not legislation, is the binding constraint.

September 15, 2026

Wildfire Survivor Network’s Joy Chen on: Recovery & Accountability

Twenty months after the Eaton Fire, a pickleball WhatsApp group from the Altadena Town & Country Club has become one of the more consequential forces in California utility and insurance policy. The Every Fire Survivor's Network (EFSN)now speaks for more than 10,000 Eaton and Palisades survivors, and its executive director, Joy Chen – a former Los Angeles deputy mayor and Fortune 500 executive recruiter – spent the summer in Sacramento arguing that California does not have a wildfire liability problem so much as a fire causation problem.

August 25, 2026

USC’s Luskin Center’s State of Los Angeles County Housing and Neighborhoods (SOLACHAN) 2026

As Los Angeles County's homeownership rate falls to a near 54-year low and 57 percent of renters spend a third or more of their income on rent, the question of whether a decade of pro-supply policy is finally registering in the data has become central to the region's housing debate. TPR here republishes the Directors Letter on the The State of Los Angeles County Housing and Neighborhoods (SOLACHAN) 2026.

August 25, 2026

Saving the City: Ron Blatman

In conversation with TPR, Ron Blatman, the San Francisco producer behind the PBS series Saving the Bay and now Saving the City, a four-part documentary on urban civic problem-solving headed to public television and streaming, argues that the durable municipal wins of the last quarter century have come from parks, trails, and reclaimed waterfronts

August 6, 2026

The “Naivety” of NYC’s RFP for 5 Publicly Funded, Private Operated Grocery Stores

TPR excerpts here the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s RFP issued July 27 which seeks operators for N.Y.C.— five publicly funded, privately operated grocery stores, one per borough, by 2029. NYCEDC will fund and deliver turnkey fit-out, cover rent and property taxes across a term of at least ten years. NYCEDC will retain ownership of the store brand; selected operators will merchandise and staff the stores and sell a designated "Core Basket" of produce, meat, seafood, and essential groceries at prices averaging 30 percent below retail, supported by negotiated "Affordability Payments" underwriting the resulting operating deficits. Restaurant insider Nick Kokonas’ online analysis of the RFP is also included and follows.

August 6, 2026

Felicia Marcus "A New Bridge With Another Expiration Date"

In conversation, Felicia Marcus, the William C. Landreth Visiting Fellow at Stanford's Water in the West program and former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, assesses the plan federal officials have just accepted to cut Colorado River use through 2028 which she calls a large band-aid rather than the tourniquet the basin needs. She reflects on 25 years of living beyond the river's means, the compact arithmetic that set the overallocation in motion, and the shift required from two-year interim patches toward a durable post-2026 framework. Drawing on service at the federal, state, and municipal levels, Marcus argues that Washington has abandoned the "800-pound gorilla" role that once produced the Bay-Delta Accord and the Quantification Settlement Agreement. Her prescription rests on financing and inclusion – capital to scale conservation and retrofits, and negotiations that reach past the seven state delegations to local agencies, academics, and tribes.

August 4, 2026

Two cities burned in LA fires settle YIMBY lawsuit

The Planning Report here shares a CalMatters’ Ben Christopher feature that reports: homeowners in Malibu and Pasadena, who saw their neighborhoods burn in the Eaton and Palisades fires last year, will soon be able to build up to four units on their properties now that the two fire-scarred cities have settled a lawsuit brought by pro-development activists. In the settlement: both Malibu and Altadena agreed to repeal their local anti-duplex ordinances suspending SB 9 in post-fire very high fire hazard severity zones and accept all pending and future applications filed under the law.

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© 2026 The Planning Report | David Abel, Publisher, ABL, Inc.