Coastal Board’s Controversial Director Resigns

Michael Fischer, the consummate bureaucratic infighter and defender of the California Coastal Commission who enraged developers and sometimes displeased environmentalists, resigned Tuesday as its executive director.

Fischer, 45, who became executive director in 1978, said he will leave the $58,400-a-year post on July 5 to join a private consulting firm as an urban planner.

Fischer said he will become a senior associate with the land use planning firm of Sedway Cooke Associates of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

For the past year, Fischer has privately expressed a desire to leave the commission--largely, he said, because he wanted to begin a new career in the private sector. He said he decided on a career change three years ago.

Fischer’s departure comes at a time when the coastal planning agency faces one of the most serious challenges in its nine-year history.

Gov. George Deukmejian, who as attorney general battled with Fischer over commission policies and has vowed as governor to abolish the commission, has cut the commission’s funding by 20% in his budget proposal.

In addition, there is widespread concern among environmental interests that political appointments to the coastal commission by the governor and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown may tilt the commission toward development interests. Recently, for example, Brown let it be known that he would not reappoint Melvin Nutter, who is viewed by environmentalists as “the commission’s conscience.”

In the last several months, five other staff members in key management positions have quit and staff morale is said to be low.

Fischer denied that the governor’s opposition was responsible for his decision to leave. If anything, Fischer said, Deukmejian’s unrelenting attack on the commission delayed his departure.

“Had the last two years been more supportive and less contentious and less difficult I would have left earlier,” Fischer said.

Now, Fischer said, many of the commission’s primary objectives have either been met or soon will be, including the approval of local coastal plans that will chart the future course of development along California’s 1,000-mile coast.

The governor’s office said there would be no comment on Fischer’s resignation.

Fischer’s protestations notwithstanding, many in Sacramento find it difficult to disassociate his decision to quit from the current political atmosphere in the state Capitol.

Assemblyman Byron D. Sher (D-Palo Alto), chairman of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and a commission backer, said Tuesday, “He may have a career change in mind, but there may be other factors at work as well. Clearly, the governor is very antagonistic to the coastal commission and its work, and he has demonstrated that by the dramatic budget cuts during the last three budgets.”

Just last Thursday, after repeated requests by Fischer for a meeting, the coastal official made a personal appeal to the governor to restore $1.6 million in cuts Deukmejian proposed in the commission’s budget for the 1985-86 fiscal year, which begins July 1.

The proposed cuts would result in the loss of 16 commission employees and the closure of the commission’s Eureka office.

Although the Legislature, in part because of Fischer’s public testimony and behind-the-scenes lobbying, restored the funds in its version of the budget, the money is subject to the governor’s veto when he gets the spending plan, and few lawmakers expect that a veto override would be successful.

Ever since voters approved a sweeping coastal protection initiative in 1972, the state’s coastal development controls have been viewed as a model across the country and a source of continuing controversy in California.

Local governments and developers accused the coastal commission of undue delays in approving permits and unreasonable denials of others. Five years ago, for example, an organization of coastal landowners angrily demanded that the commission fire Fischer, branding him “a self-styled coastal dictator, wielding his power whenever and wherever he chooses.”

More recently, as the commission has attempted to take what many have called a “more balanced view,” commission decisions approving coastal developments have been assailed by environmentalists.

Such decisions sometimes resulted in the commission overturning staff recommendations, and Fischer admitted Tuesday to “weakening bonds” between the commission and its staff.

He described the commission’s role as moving from an activist body intimately involved in planning to a secondary though no less important role of enforcing local coastal plans, handling appeals from local decisions and evaluating off-shore oil development proposals.