Abstract
California requires cities and counties to adopt general plans as a means of preventing unplanned development and guiding the local land use decision making process. Subsequent to general plan requirements, California enacted a series of consistency requirements, which legislators intended to coerce cities and counties to implement their general plans. Many of these consistency requirements require city and county planning agencies to review projects and land use decisions for consistency with their general plans. However, there is very little material discussing the methods and practices used by planning agencies when reviewing projects for consistency. My thesis researches the current availability of guidance about consistency analysis in California and attempts to improve it through the development and testing of a hypothetical standard model of consistency analysis. I demonstrate the potential for more comprehensive reviews as well as the potential for my proposed framework’s data to be used as plan implementation feedback. However, my proposed framework’s data could only be used meaningfully if aggregated, meaning my framework or would have to be used for virtually every land use decision to produce an indicator of plan implementation progress. After applying my proposed consistency analysis framework to a Yolo County environmental education and renewable energy project, I found that while my proposed framework was more comprehensive than current consistency analysis techniques in California, my framework proved too time consuming to be feasible for use on a case-by-case basis at the local level. However, my framework represents the first draft of a standard model for consistency analysis in California, which, over time, would contribute data useful for the evaluation of plan implementation.