Yes to Good Coastal Management : Congress should reauthorize law that provides economic and many other benefits

This week a House subcommittee will vote on reauthorization of the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. Passed in 1972 with strong bipartisan support and signed by President Richard Nixon, the act seems exactly the sort of legislation the new majority in Congress could embrace without hesitation. That some Republicans now appear to be balking raises serious questions about the sincerity of their commitment to an expanded role for states and a less coercive federal government.

The act defines broad policy goals for the management of the coasts, including the promotion of public access to beaches and the shoreline, environmentally sustainable economic development, protection of fragile wetlands and prevention of hazards like erosion.

To further those goals, the act provides incentives to coastal states, significantly grants to help develop and implement state coastal management plans.

Under the act, states also gained the authority to impose their own plans and procedures over federal activities in the coastal zone. For example, states may control offshore oil and gas activities in federal waters off their coasts or the use of federal property along their shorelines.

States that disagree with the law’s broad policy goals need not be part of the federal program, which by nearly every measure has been a great success. Twenty-nine coastal states and U.S. territories participate.

In California, the federal act has provided a large share of the operating funds of the state Coastal Commission. In allowing the state to control many federal activities along the coast, the law permits the Coastal Commission to specify how oil may be shipped from drilling stations, to control weapons testing, dredging and the incineration of waste in coastal waters and to shape the development of closed federal military bases near the coast.

Hearings on the reauthorization of the act were held last week in a subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee, and overwhelming support for the measure was apparent. Backers, however, fear trouble on budgetary grounds if and when the measure comes up for a vote in the full committee, headed by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), a critic of environmental causes.

Reauthorization is essential. Congress should see this federal program as a bargain in light of the incalculable benefits that carefully managed coastal resources provide to the economies of this nation’s coastal states.