SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S ENVIRONMENT At the Crossroads : The Coastline: <i> DEBATING DEVELOPMENT ALONG THE SHORES </i> : Public interest in the coast, which ebbs and flows, is again on the rise. : Assault on Nature at the Edge of the Ocean

For any Californians who still think the creation of the Coastal Commission in 1972 stopped view-robbing coastal development, assured ever-widening access to beaches and generally preserved a flawless future for the state’s legendary shoreline, Judith Rosener has some bad news. California’s coast--in some way, its metaphorical soul--still is in danger of being swallowed up by developers on one side and by erosion on the other, and what remains is often befouled by garbage left by swimmers and sunbathers or washed ashore from ships at sea.

“Sometimes I wish there wasn’t (a Coastal Commission),” said Rosener, a former coastal commissioner who now teaches at the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management, “because people still think that they are being protected.” But as Rosener sees it, they’re not. In many ways, the commission--resisted by local governments, manipulated by the Legislature and undermined by Gov. George Deukmejian--is failing.

After celebrating a glorious sunset at Zuma or Laguna, it may be difficult to imagine the coast in serious peril. But that is only because so many people spend so much time and so much money preserving the pretty picture. In a real sense, the relatively clean and readily accessible broad and sandy beaches of California’s coast are nearly as much a product of image-making as Disneyland. The “imagineering” ranges from workers toiling to stop erosion in Oceanside and preservationists fighting the loss of open shoreline in Irvine to laborers combing 11 tons of trash each day from Los Angeles County beaches and planners scrambling to preserve the monarch butterfly habitat north of Santa Barbara.

Long-Term Needs

Public interest in the coast, which ebbs and flows wildly, is once again on the rise. But the problems menacing the coast today are the products of nature and human nature--two forces supremely resistant to good intentions. Real solutions will require patience. “This can’t be a one-night stand,” said Bob Hattoy of the Sierra Club. “This has to be a long-term relationship.”

Development has, is, and will be the politically stickiest problem, and the pressure is greatest in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The two counties have only 10% of California’s coastline but create 50% of its coastal development applications--more than 1,000 a year. About 90% of those are approved by the state Coastal Commission, even though Los Angeles and Orange are the two slowest counties to comply with the Coastal Act of 1976. Neither has prepared a local coastal plan that complies with that law, nor have some of their biggest beach cities--Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Torrance and Costa Mesa.

“In some of the Orange County (cities), they just told us to go fly a kite (when plans were sought),” said Gary Holloway, who oversees the Local Coastal Plan approval process for the commission. “Under the law, there is nothing we can do.” The Coastal Commission’s authority has indeed slumped mightily since the late 1970s, when it could dictate the color of homeowners’ cottages or the rates of innkeepers’ rooms. Now the commission is so understaffed it sometimes enlists high-school-age volunteers to look for banned development, even though the agency lacks the legal power to immediately stop any illegality it finds.

Deukmejian has made no secret of his desires to do away with the commission entirely, but coastal protection still is too popular with voters. Instead, he has bled the commission’s budget by 40% since 1982, a tactic Sierra Club lobbyist Paula Carrell called “death by a thousand (budget) cuts.” Gordon Hart of the Sierra Club goes further, blaming the governor for inhibiting the Legislature from addressing any coastal problems. “Nobody is proposing any new (coastal) legislation,” Hart said, “because they know he will veto it.”

The governor’s office acknowledges rigid ideological opposition to the idea of turning local land-use planning decisions over to non-elected commissioners in Sacramento, despite voter approval of that very idea in 1972. But spokesman Kevin Brett insists the governor thinks that the commission’s current problems are its own fault. The commission missed its original 1981 coast-plan deadline long before Deukmejian was elected, and has never caught up, Brett noted. After 13 years, only 56% of the local coastal plans have been certified. Funds were cut because “the commission has just not done its job,” Brett said. How will the commission ever be able to catch up without money and without support from the governor? Brett does not say.

In some areas, a kind of anarchy results. Developers bulldoze illegal roads in the Malibu hills with little fear of discovery, much less punishment. Fines levied for unlawful construction are shrugged off as just another cost of doing business. Malibu residents use subterfuge--opposing a sewer--to arrest growth. Laguna Niguel residents sidestep local elected officials and negotiate directly for concessions from builders of a $300-million Monarch Beach resort. UCLA environmental law professor Henry W. McGee Jr. contends tax-starved local governments approve many coastal projects for the new taxes they generate, and any other public interest be damned. “This is a statewide resource, but it is not really being managed as such,” he said. The usually sad result, said Fern Pirkle of the Friends of the Irvine Coast, is that “you drive along PCH (the Pacific Coast Highway) and you can hardly see the beach any more.”

But, grass-roots action can wring compromises from cooperative developers that reduce the loss of open space and views. A 20-year battle over the Irvine Coast--the last remaining big undeveloped stretch of Orange County coast--recently ended with the Irvine Co. agreeing to scale back its housing-and-hotel project to avoid developing three-fourths of the property, including most of the land on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway.

Erosion, on the other hand, is not easily resolved by either negotiation or legislation. It is mostly a product of human interference in natural processes of sand replenishment--and it worsens with each seawall erected to contain it. Fully 86% of the California shore is now eroding, some by as much as 10 feet a year.

Erosion itself is a natural process in which tides and winter storms siphon sand off beaches and deposit it in deep submarine canyons all along the coast, including one particularly deep trench off La Jolla. Normally, that erosion is repaired by sand swept in by mild summer currents or carried in by rivers. But harbors, jetties and seawalls block coastal sand flow, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has said that dams cut the river replenishment by two-thirds. Now when a winter storm eats away at a beach, people must restore it. “We tend to think of the sandy beach as the natural condition, but much of it (in Southern California) is man-made,” said Bill S. Satow, assistant director of the state Department of Boating and Waterways.

Man-made means man-maintained, as Oceanside has found out. Oceanside Harbor acts as a sump for sand pushed by summer currents, causing the marina to shoal and a nearby beach to starve. City officials have responded with a $12-million “sand bypass system” that vacuums up sand from the harbor and pipes it in a seawater slurry to the beach. Other cities, such as Long Beach, dabble with synthetic seaweed, which supposedly grabs sand suspended in the water before it is carried out to sea. Los Angeles County uses the direct approach: moving thousands of tons of sand to eroded beaches from an oceanfront construction site. “The bottom line,” said Gregory Woodell, a supervising planner at the county Department of Harbors and Beaches, “is that if man wants a beach, he is going to have to continually replace the sand that is being taken away.”

Trash, as any veteran beach-goer will attest, is no less irritating a blight than either development or erosion. But because it can include such flotsam as used hypodermic needles and rusty scrap metal, it poses an even more immediate threat.

A beach cleanup effort last year found California’s shore tidier than most, but still burdened by a lot of garbage--100 tons on a single day. The haul was greater in urban areas, where the beaches do not usually have 5,700 volunteers to sift refuse from sand. Only 69 trash collectors typically tidy up Los Angeles County beaches, which receive 4,000 tons of garbage each year. Unknown tonnage washes out with the tide, killing wildlife that eats or strangles in it.

Another problem is storm drains, which routinely belch out garbage, oil and “almost everything imaginable,” said Dorothy Green of the Santa Monica-based environmental group Heal the Bay. Sewage spills from exploded pipes frequently make TV news and close beaches, which is bad enough, but smaller leaks may be more common--and often go unnoticed until plastic tampon applicators appear on the beach. Equally scary are potentially infectious medical wastes, such as the syringes and vials of blood that washed onto San Diego County beaches last winter.

Most often, however, beach trash is humdrum. Almost half of what was picked up in last year’s national beach cleanup was plastic, and most of the rest was such picnic leavings as glass bottles and metal bottle caps. So if the beaches are going to improve, beach-goers themselves must repent. Abandoning a used cup or foam ice chest may seem inoffensive, but Don Feinstein of the Venice Action Committee asserts “the stuff is so fragile that it just dissolves and becomes part of the beach.” Indeed, the beach veteran complains that every handful of Venice Beach sand contains the ubiquitous plastic pebbly remnants of foam cups and insulation. It is the final insult for our beleaguered beaches.

REPORT CARD

Average score: 6

Three views on our progress, rated on a one to 10 scale

* Fern Pirkle, Friends of the Irvine Coast : “The Coastal Act has been moderately successful; I’m reasonably pleased with what has happened. But so much is still being built right on the coast . . .” Score: 6

* Melvin Nutter, lawyer and former Coastal Commission chairman : “It’s a mixed bag . . . In terms of wetland protection, it looks like we’re going to do better than just a few years ago (but) as population pressures continue and as more people act to maximize their short-term return, the (development) battle will go on and on.” Score: 7

* Ann Nutthoff, Natural Resources Defense Council : “You have a lot of valuable resources; some have been seriously degraded and the rest are endangered . . . Coastal access has not kept up with population growth (and) we’re still allowing too much development, but at least it’s sited more sensitively than in the past.” Score: 5

TURNING POINTS

* January, 1990--Gov. George Deukmejian to submit his 1991 budget plan, including critical funding for the California Coastal Commission; the Legislature and preservationists to seek an increase to make up for heavy cuts in the past, but Deukmejian is resisting.

* Early 1990--California Coastal Commission to seek some way to enforce state regulations against illegal development. Such work goes virtually unchecked now because builders often can finish a job before overworked commission inspectors can obtain court orders to stop them.

* Mid-1990--Proposal to substantially expand Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors will require special planning to save valuable but fast-dwindling coastal wetland wildlife habitat from dredging, filling or other environmental degradation.

* November, 1990--Election of new governor is expected to end an eight-year legislative and regulatory logjam blamed on Deukmejian, whose antipathy for the Coastal Commission has stymied enactment of new coastal rules and enforcement of old safeguards.

VOICES

“The environment, generally, is healthier on the beach than even a few blocks inland. It’s a critical resource . . . The water quality has changed somewhat, and there’s a problem with potential oil spills from the oil islands and tankers. But there are days when you can see 20 feet or more into the water . . . And unlike the county’s hills and canyons, everybody has access to the beach.”

--Lifeguard Capt. Bill Richardson of the Huntington Beach Marine Safety Department

“This town has just exploded . . . You think they’re running out of land and then they sell off the hills with all of those citrus trees that you see up there. . . . It’s really hard to imagine what they’re going to do to (the coast) but I assume that by the time my grandchildren are grown that it will be solid from Santa Barbara to L.A. I don’t think there’s any doubt of that.”

--Elizabeth Fortner, a homeowner in Summerland in Santa Barbara County

POPULATION DENSITY Chart shows population growth in five selected cities along the Southern California coastline. Figures indicate number of persons per square mile in the years 1960 and 1988, and percentage of growth in that time period.

Development of California’s coastline in recent years has resulted in some of the state’s most spectacular population growth and created some of its most densely packed areas.

Santa Barbara 1960: 2,983 1988: 4,202 Percent growth: 41%

Hermosa Beach 1960: 11,511 1988: 14,522 Percent growth: 26%

Huntington Beach 1960: 500 1988: 7,219 Percent growth: 1,344%

San Clemente 1960: 1,040 1988: 2,180 Percent growth: 110%

Oceanside 1960: 889 1988: 2,557 Percent growth: 188%

Source: U.S. Census

BEACH CLOSURES

Beach closures in Southern California coastline counties that were caused by sewage contamination.

COUNTY 1987 1988 1989* Los Angeles 12 7 3 Orange 8 12 7 San Diego N/A 79 30 Santa Barbara 1 1 0 Ventura 2 0 1

*NOTE: 1989 figures from January to Aug. 31.

SOURCES: L.A. County Department of Health Services, County of Orange/Health Care Agency, San Diego Health Department, Santa Barbara County Health Department, Ventura County Health Department.