This piece from the San Diego paper blasts a study commissioned about a local planning initiative in San Marcos. This may seem like a small issue, but it's not in California and in the West, where more and more local land use decisions are being made by voters, a phenomenon known as "ballot box planning." In my recent reporting and panel on the subject, I discovered that consulting companies that provide biased studies for cities attempting to fight ballot box planning have become a minor cottage indusry. A land use ballot initiative campaign in Thousand Oaks, Calif., earlier this month turned on just such a study. Commissioned by city officials who opposed the initiative, the study made several unsupported claims about the problems the city would have if the initiative -- which would have required voter approval for large-scale developments -- had passed. While there was some backing away from the study's more ridiculous conclusions, the study appeared to have convinced voters that the initiative was problematic. It lost.