Coast Panel at 25: Fight Is Never Really Won

For dazzling decades, California’s sensational coastline is what lured and kept so many here. The beaches, especially in the southern part of the state, are the core of our regional identity, a grand public playground. Picture the Pacific at sunset.

Generations of Californians and visitors have basked in this natural majesty. But by the 1970s, dark concerns had seeped into the scene. There were offshore oil spills. Ocean-side power plants, cheek-to-jowl houses and towering condominiums threatened to fence off the ocean to all but a few. Enter Proposition 20; its passage 25 years ago this week, after a noisy populist campaign, ushered in an era dedicated to protection of the state’s 1,100-mile coastline. The 1972 ballot measure let Californians assert their interest in this fragile public resource against that of the developers, utilities and oil companies that fought hard to kill the measure.

With the Coastal Initiative--Proposition 20--and supplementary legislation four years later, the Coastal Commission was created as a permanent state agency. It was empowered to protect, maintain and enhance the quality of the coastal environment, the shoreline as well as a zone parallel to the tide line. A major goal was to make sure the public could reach the seashore. Although everyone has the right to use the beaches up to the mean high-tide line, that right is denied if “No Trespassing” signs or sprawling waterfront tracts block the way.

The 12 members of the appointed Coastal Commission must engaged in an endless balancing act. They must weigh the rights of private property owners to build on their land against the public’s expanding recreational needs and prudent resource conservation efforts. It is not a simple or easy task.

A quarter-century after its passage, Proposition 20 has a record of some spectacular successes, often best defined by what hasn’t happened along the Pacific coast: the proliferation of nuclear power plants that didn’t occur; the proposed towers and luxury resorts that were downsized or denied; the wetlands that were spared the bulldozer.

Given all the pre-1972 building along Southern California’s beachfront, the commission’s biggest “saves” for the public have come along California’s more rugged northern and central coastlines. But that’s now where the most pressure for development is felt. For example, the agency will soon take up a proposal for an ocean-side golf resort and other facilities near San Simeon and the spectacular Hearst Castle.

The drive for new construction never lets up, and sometimes the commission has approved projects that better serve real estate developers than the public’s recreational needs. Current plans for Marina del Rey that include even higher high-rises and virtually no open space are a sorry case in point.

While the commission needs to do better, so do cities and counties, which are required by law to take a lead role in coastal land planning. The commission is charged with reviewing those plans for consistency with its own mandates. But Los Angeles County and some local cities have clearly abdicated their duty.

Public access to the tide line is still a key priority of the commission. Perennially underfunded, understaffed and overworked, the panel has been at risk of losing important public access ways. Its fight for the right of Californians to reach the seashore means contesting private land holders who refuse to provide access and scrounging funds to maintain stairways and paths already in public hands.

After 25 years, perhaps the commission’s greatest accomplishment is a growing public understanding that California’s irreplaceable coast is never finally saved but always is being saved. Every Californian has a role in that fight.