Coastal Panel: To Protect and Serve

The newly appointed coastal commissioners got their jobs because of their hostility to coastal protection laws (“Coastal Panel Halts Bid to Fire Director,” July 13). But they were clearly surprised and upset by the swift, bipartisan blast they received from the statewide press over their attempt to cripple those protections. They have a lot to learn.

Without ever having worked with their director or staff, they were prepared to dump them all. They hadn’t even learned the parameters of their job and came not as commissioners but as hatchet men.

Gov. Pete Wilson and Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), who applied pressure to fire the director, are merely the conduits in a power play to remove the teeth from the existing rules. There seems to be no end to the services they will perform for their big campaign donors. Did they really believe that the press--or public--would sleep through a proxy grab for the Coastal Commission by developers and the power industries?

If these new coastal commissioners are going to be of service to the citizens of California, they are going to have to look beyond their past personal difficulties with the commission. They just don’t have the option of deciding which laws they will uphold and which they’ll ignore. Now they serve not just themselves but the entire state, and their judgments must be based on a different bottom line--one that will comply with and promote existing laws, and will preserve the integrity, beauty and accessibility of California’s coast.

ALAN REMINGTON

Costa Mesa