Coastal Crusader in Deep Water

The ocean has been an essential element of Peter Douglas’ life from the moment he left war-ravaged Germany as a 7-year-old and sailed across the Atlantic.

Douglas remembers that later, while attending a private boys school near Carmel, he would slip away and spend countless hours sitting on rocks by the ocean “contemplating the meaning of life.” That was where Douglas said he developed “a very spiritual kind of connection” to the sea.

It is that devotion to the coast and to the laws he helped design to protect it that have landed Douglas at the center of a pivotal fight over the future direction of the powerful Coastal Commission where he serves as executive director.

Douglas has spent his entire professional career--nearly a quarter of a century--fighting to save coastal wetlands and preserve agricultural lands, opposing some large residential and commercial projects, working to limit offshore oil drilling and laboring to open more of the coast to the public.

But his detractors, and there are many, brand Douglas as an uncompromising obstructionist who uses the state’s coastal protection laws to stand in the path of needed development and deny the property rights of coastal landowners. Now, they want the Coastal Commission to fire him.

San Mateo attorney Joseph Gughemetti, who has battled the commission in court on behalf of coastal property owners, complains that the agency’s staff is a “never-ending bureaucracy” that extracts concessions from landowners who want to develop their property. “The staff is very environmentally oriented,” he said. “It’s a nightmare.”

It is time, Gughemetti and others say, that the commission replace Douglas with someone more pro-development and sensitive to the concerns of property owners.

As the newly Republican-dominated Coastal Commission apparently is moving toward firing Douglas on Friday, his supporters from the state Legislature to city halls, from environmental groups to concerned citizens, are mounting a campaign to save him that is as passionate as his defense of the ocean.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a strongly worded motion Tuesday backing Douglas and calling on the commission not to remove him as executive director. Democratic lawmakers from the state Capitol to the nation’s Capitol, including U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, have lined up behind Douglas.

As a downcast Douglas looked on, the eight Republicans on the commission moved swiftly Wednesday to elect one of their own, Louis Calcagno, as the commission’s chairman over the vehement objections of the four remaining Democrats. It was Calcagno who last week called the unprecedented special meeting of the commission Friday to consider a tersely worded agenda that begins with a decision on the “future employment of the executive director.”

A parade of speakers favoring Douglas addressed the commission for 2 1/2 hours Wednesday and dozens more supporters staged a demonstration on his behalf outside the posh waterfront hotel in Huntington Beach where the commission is meeting for three days.

The groundswell of support now includes two Republican legislators from coastal districts. Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Santa Barbara) sent a letter to Calcagno saying he was extremely troubled by the move to oust Douglas. “The people of California . . . certainly do not want to see the environmental quality of California’s coastline compromised because of what might be a rapid and ill-considered move regarding the commission’s executive director.”

Along with Assemblyman Bruce McPherson (R-Santa Cruz), Firestone said: “We agree that without the stewardship of Mr. Douglas, the people of California will lose the tremendous institutional memory and experience he brings to the commission.”

In recent weeks, Douglas has become a symbol of a long and hard-fought battle over the future of the California coast.

State Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler, a critic of Douglas who made clear he wants him to step aside, challenged the effort by supporters to portray the state’s entire coastal protection program as being in jeopardy.

“For any one person to suggest, as some of [Douglas’] supporters suggest, that he stands between the coast and the barbarians is erroneous,” Wheeler said.

At 53, the bearded and balding Douglas is no stranger to controversy, having been at the forefront of the earliest efforts to save the state’s shoreline from unbridled development.

On the wall of his high-rise San Francisco office hangs a memento of the hard-edged 1972 campaign to pass Proposition 20, a grass-roots initiative coauthored by Douglas, which created the Coastal Commission.

The “Dennis the Menace” cartoon features the comic character and his family unloading a beach umbrella and picnic lunch from their car after an abortive attempt to reach the beach. “We went to the beach . . . but it was gone,” the caption reads.

For Douglas, the cartoon is a reminder of what he considers the fundamental purpose of the commission: to preserve public access to the coast, which was being walled off by waterfront development at an alarming rate, particularly in coastal enclaves such as Malibu during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“The coast was in a very precarious state,” Douglas recalls. “It was clear that unless something drastic was done, it would be irretrievably lost or compromised.”

There were plans for nuclear power plants, four-lane coastal highways and extensive development of apartments, condominiums and commercial structures, especially in Southern California.

Four years after the state’s voters passed the initiative despite an expensive campaign waged by coastal landowners, developers and oil companies, Douglas helped write the state’s landmark 1976 Coastal Act as a legislative consultant.

The tough Coastal Act was a byproduct of a bipartisan consensus to protect the scenic California coast.

Douglas soon left the state Capitol, joining the commission as deputy director in January 1977. There, he witnessed first-hand the commission’s struggles to balance environmental protection with coastal development and oversee the preparation of local government land-use plans for the coast.

In June 1985, he became executive director.

To Douglas, who graduated from UCLA with a law degree and undergraduate degrees in psychology and political science, it was the perfect kind of public service job. It was also a way to devote himself to the protection of a natural resource that had a powerful impact on his life.

Since then, he, along with the commission, has successfully fought to block more oil drilling and leasing off the California coast.

With the support of the commission, Douglas was instrumental in negotiating a 1991 agreement with Southern California Edison to embark on an expensive plan to offset the impact on the marine environment of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. He angered important officials, including Resources Secretary Wheeler, by refusing to accept Edison’s request last year to scale back the mitigation package. The commission deadlocked on overturning Douglas.

Despite Douglas’ strong staff recommendation against it, the commission in January approved a 3,300-unit housing development in and around the Bolsa Chica wetlands next to Huntington Beach.

Ed Mountford, vice president of the Koll Real Estate Group, said Douglas let the developer know upfront that nothing they were going to say about the proposal to build 900 of the homes in the wetlands would change his belief that they were prohibited by the Coastal Act. “They basically told us don’t waste your breath.”

Even before the Republicans took control of the commission last month, Douglas’ advice often was not followed. For example, along the Gaviota coastline of Santa Barbara County, Douglas opposed a plan by Arco to build a golf course on coastal land that was once agricultural, but the commission approved it.

Douglas tried to limit the controversial Ellwood Shores development in Goleta because the property near UC Santa Barbara includes some of the last native grasslands on the Southern California coast. The commission refused to take his advice.

When Douglas objected to Los Angeles County’s plan for 22-story high-rises in Marina del Rey, the commission endorsed the proposal.

Still, Douglas sees victories in the commission’s acceptance of some conditions intended to minimize the environmental impact of coastal projects and provide public access to the shoreline.

The fight over Douglas is not simply a partisan squabble between Republicans and Democrats, but rather is ideological in nature.

In fact, the commission’s last chairman, Carl Williams, an appointee of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), said Douglas’ future was frequently a subject of discussion because of differences over developments along the coastline.

Nevertheless, in a long private letter to the commissioners, Douglas is passionate about keeping his job. “Those who know me, understand that my work for the commission has never been just a job. . . . I believe in this work, which is challenging, meaningful and rewarding in many intangible ways.”