an administrative judge recommended that the ride-sharing giant be fined $7.3 million and be suspended from operating in California. [...]

Uber has not complied with state laws designed to ensure that drivers are doling out rides fairly to all passengers, regardless of where they live or who they are. — latimes.com

These have been boom times for companies that rip out lawns and replace them with drought-tolerant landscaping, but now their business might be drying up.

The Metropolitan Water District said Thursday it would no longer offer rebates to entice homeowners to get rid of their lawns because the agency ran out of money much sooner than it expected.

That is bad news for [...] landscape contractor in Los Angeles. Grass removal has become about 40 percent of his business, driven by the rebates. — scpr.org

While a golden brown lawn is seen as a badge of honor to some residents of drought-stricken California, in fact, they are doing more harm to the environment than good, says UC Agriculture and Natural Resources turf expert Jim Baird. [...]

maintaining lawns rather than letting them die or replacing the grass with synthetic turf, concrete or so-called drought-tolerant plants offers important ecological services. [...]

“The more we let our grass lawns die or go away, the hotter it's going to get” — ucanr.edu

Todd Conversano never thought he'd be able to enlarge the 1950s ranch-style home he and his wife bought a decade ago. Two previous geological reports on the property north of Beverly Hills suggested that it would cause drainage problems or, worse, destabilize the steep slope above the lot.

Instead, he came up with a smarter, cheaper and less intrusive solution. [...]

"I figured out how to do it without touching the building," — latimes.com

Californians in May shot past Gov. Jerry Brown's water conservation targets in response to the drought emergency [...].

New numbers, released Wednesday, show that the state's ambitious conservation campaign is working, with statewide residential water use declining 28.9 percent in May from its baseline 2013 levels. The figures surpassed Brown's order in April to cut water use statewide by 25 percent. — mercurynews.com

[...] the drought is a gusher for a growing number of tech startups in the emerging world of the Internet of Things, the buzzy term for the trend of connecting devices and data in the physical realm to the Internet. Getting more sensors into the environment will help thousands of farms, businesses and cities figure out where water is going and how it can be diverted for the most efficient use. Agriculture is the area most ripe for collecting more and higher-quality data. — forbes.com

'His signature style helped bring Palm Springs to the international stage and his body of work is still as fresh today as when first created...' — The Desert Sun

These are strange days in San Francisco, where the clamor to build needed housing — especially at affordable levels — is matched only by the self-righteous vigor with which actual proposals for that housing tend to be opposed...But if we want a well-planned city with distinctive new buildings for all its citizens, projects like this show that good design and good policy can go hand in hand. — San Francisco Chronicle

What would you do about the drought if you were Jerry Brown? A new 2-3 player board game by Bay Area-based graphic designer Alfred Twu allows you to play the politics of water in California.

Twu specializes in designing games that try and have fun with complex issues. Currently, he is developing one called “California Housing Crisis” that deals with San Francisco’s runaway housing costs, and he previously designed a fantasy map for a U.S. national high speed rail system that went viral. — blogs.kcrw.com

The California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday that cities and counties may require developers to provide below-market-rate housing as a condition of a building permit.

The decision is expected to make it easier for Los Angeles and other cities with housing shortages to force developers to build or pay for affordable housing. — LA Times

For decades, tourists have been coming to Southern California's Coachella Valley, drawn by spectacular mountain vistas, great weather and lush landscapes.

Those landscapes have been, for the most part, man-made — an artificial oasis in a land of desert. [...]

As California enters a fourth year of drought and state and local water officials unveil a series of conservation dictates, at least some hotels in the valley — big and small — have begun launching water conservation measures. — USA Today

A diverse alliance of communities — including Los Angeles County's third-largest city — is fighting California's long-planned bullet train route into the heart of the San Fernando Valley, saying it would bring irreparable harm... The coalition of communities is demanding that only routes that are predominantly underground should be considered.

The growing resistance is coming in part from urban, working-class neighborhoods that are portraying the surface route as an environmental injustice. — LA Times

Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today issued an executive order to establish a California greenhouse gas reduction target of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 - the most aggressive benchmark enacted by any government in North America to reduce dangerous carbon emissions over the next decade and a half. "With this order, California sets a very high bar for itself and other states and nations, but it's one that must be reached - for this generation and generations to come," said Governor Brown. — gov.ca.gov

This project [titled 'Projection'], announced last October, is probably the first time in a long time that the old inn (aka the Sunset Pacific) has gotten so much attention. The Bates—whose nickname is as much a callback to 'Psycho' as it is to the motel's location near the intersection of Bates and Sunset—has been vacant for decades, except for the squatters and the occasional, totally fun-looking, likely illegal party — la.curbed.com