California’s Coastline

In response to “California’s Beleaguered Coastline: Rapacious Developers Ignore the Law,” by Madelyn Glickfeld, Opinion, Nov. 5:

Describing the unprecedented wave of destruction at the hands of pillaging developers, Glickfeld, a member of the California Coastal Commission, says of our coastline, “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.”

Glickfeld might have been speaking of Laguna Beach rather than that of her own Malibu community, for coastal destruction is as rampant here in south Orange County as it is north of Los Angeles. California’s coastal tragedy is its raging extensiveness. As we breathe, or try to, developers are changing the face of the state’s most prized physical attribute, and it’s hardly for the better.

In Orange County, Laguna Canyon is threatened by a proposed development project that would put 3,200 housing units, acres of shops, roads and pavement, and a 250-acre private golf course in the heart of what’s been an extraordinarily viable coastal greenbelt. Part of the tragedy is that Laguna Canyon is the county’s last remaining unspoiled passage to the sea. Soaring coastal land values have presumably lured the Irvine Co.’s new chairman, Donald Bren, who is, as Glickfeld deplored, the kind of speculator who has no emotional attachment to the land or the project’s impacted communities.

What does Bren know of the legendary canyon, its fragile watershed and water runoff threat to public beaches and private property owners who live downstream of his proposed project?

There is much work to be done to stop the destruction. Empowering the Coastal Commission is just the beginning. But developers also owe citizens of California reparations for the damage they do to our public resources just as oil companies compensate the federal parks and recreation treasury for violating coastal waters. Replacement value taxes should be levied against projects which destroy our public resources.

Every elected coastal community and county official must also be appraised for his or her environmental protection advocacy, and each of us, individually, must play an active role in the protection and preservation of our coastlines.

SHAREN HEATH, Laguna Beach