California’s Beleaguered Coastline: Rapacious Developers Ignore the Law

California is faced with an unprecedented wave of illegal coastal development. The California Coastal Commission is currently pursuing more than 600 violations of the Coastal Act, including such egregious examples as:

* A real-estate agent and a few property owners widen, pave and artificially drain a dirt fire road along a 2 1/2-mile ridge, without permits. The drains will concentrate runoff during the rainy season on the erodible slopes, potentially creating whole new canyons, choking the stream beds below with silt and debris and flooding the residential areas below.

* A developer despoils a freshwater marsh as a dump site for dirt, adding to the more than 90% of historic Southern California wetlands that have already disappeared, depriving birds and fish of habitats.

* An entire 23-acre canyon bottom is graded without permits. Before they were stopped, contractors moved thousands of cubic yards of earth in a landslide area, completely gutting and partly damming a natural stream channel. If the dam is not removed, heavy rains could wash out the downstream fire station and undermine Pacific Coast Highway.

* A “ranch” at the top of an important coastal canyon is being used, without permits, as a dump. Since the dump covers the headwaters of an environmentally sensitive stream, the stream bed for miles below the property has gone dry, endangering vegetation and wildlife that depend on the stream, including the migrating monarch butterfly, deer, raccoon and mountain lion.

* An illegal seawall is placed on the beach, consisting of unengineered concrete rubble and steel rods. If not removed, storm waves will soon move the concrete and steel into shallow water, presenting a danger to unsuspecting swimmers.

All these examples occurred in a 25-mile stretch of Santa Monica Mountains coastline. The commission’s enforcement staff estimates that an average of five major violations are reported each week in Los Angeles County. While more than half the statewide enforcement caseload is in the county, every part of the coast has experienced illegal development. In Big Sur, 17 miles of roads have been graded without permits, filling and blocking nearly two dozen streams.

How can this happen?

While the majority of landowners are responsible and law-abiding, a new, particularly greedy and rapacious type has recently emerged. Soaring coastal land values have attracted this kind of speculator, one without any attachment or responsibility to the land or community. Some of these landowners don’t know enough about development or land to understand the dangers to coastal resources or the surrounding community. Others are just plain crooks, intentionally carving up coastal land in a way they know would never be permitted and then trying to sell it to innocent and naive buyers.

The second part of the problem is a governor that has been trying to starve the Coastal Commission out of existence. Gov. George Deukmejian has cut the commission’s budget in each of the last seven years--110 staff members are now responsible for the same workload that 212 had in 1980-81.

The statewide enforcement program is run by one full-time enforcement officer, aided by five part-time district enforcement officers and a few part-time interns. This amounts to one full-time enforcement officer for each 1.6 million acres of land in the coastal zone. Since Deukmejian has required another 10% budget cut for the commission this fiscal year, even this inadequate enforcement program is in jeopardy.

The third part of the problem is that the Coastal Act itself and the commission’s procedures were never designed to deal with an enforcement problem this big and this serious. The enforcement program presumes that citizens will report and discourage most violations, that most violations are unintentional, that most violators will cooperatively stop work when requested and that most illegal damage to the environment can be restored when the commission asks the violator to do the work correctly. None of these is proving true.

In fact, many violations are reported too late or not at all. Some witnesses fear retribution if they report; other observers assume that activities must be done with permits since the violations are so large.

An increasing number of violators act knowledgeably and intentionally and actually step up the intensity of their work when they are caught. While the commission does have the right to seek a court restraining order and high monetary damages for intentional violators, (it recently filed a $20-million lawsuit against a violator), much additional environmental damage can occur before a restraining order can be obtained.

It is often impossible to restore sites completely. When someone cuts off the top of a mountain and fills a canyon, or cuts a road into a landslide or fills in a tide pool or wetland, one often can’t “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” When it is possible, it often takes hundreds of hours of staff time, and consequently the public’s money, to develop and approve complex restoration plans.

Solving the problem will take renewed commitments by the governor, the Legislature, the courts and the commission.

* The governor must fulfill his sworn obligation to protect the resources of the state. He must ensure that responsible agencies have the resources to bring lawbreakers to justice. That includes upholding the Coastal Act, protecting the California coast and providing the commission with adequate staff and equipment to deter illegal development.

* The commission must target high-resource, high-enforcement problem areas for cooperative, multiagency enforcement efforts. In Big Sur, enforcement and restoration of the illegally paved roads are being cooperatively pursued by Monterey County, the commission, the state attorney general and county district attorney.

In the Santa Monica Mountains Coastal Zone, Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana has laudably agreed to invite all county and state agencies responsible for land-related enforcement to meet to consider forming a multi-agency enforcement task force.

* The Legislature and the governor must give the commission tools that recognize the seriousness of the illegal development problem. It is essential that the governor reconsider his veto of SB 467, by Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), to give the commission the right to issue “cease and desist” orders. This is not an environment-versus-development issue--it is about upholding the integrity of the law.

There should be legislation that makes violators, not taxpayers, pay for the commission’s costs in prosecuting illegal developments and restoring damaged sites. Such legislation would earmark administrative fees to cover the extraordinary costs of “after the fact” permit and restoration activity.

Intentional violators should not be able to sell parcels involved in violation cases to unsuspecting buyers. When there is a confirmed violation, the commission or the attorney general should be able to record a notice of violation on the affected property, giving real-estate brokers and buyers fair warning.

There should be stronger penalties for flouting the law and stronger direction to the courts to implement those penalties. Both the minimum and maximum penalties that judges levy on intentional and repeat violators should be substantially increased. State-licensed brokers or contractors proved participants in intentional major violations should lose their state licenses.

Wildlife habitat is being irretrievably lost, coastal water quality is being degraded, public facilities are being endangered and lives and property are put at risk. When the governor and the Legislature take these intentional violations seriously, they will call them what they really are: Environmental crime, the kind of crime that requires jail time.

Californians treasure their coast--it is inspiration, recreation and relief from the stresses of urban life. Unless we commit ourselves anew to enforcement of existing laws for protection of the coast, we will lose it.