Federal Ocean Management Has an Accountability Problem That Surfers Should Care About
When Washington Controls the Breaks and California Cannot Override It, the Accountability Goes to People Who Cannot Name Your Local Point
Published by Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat | California libertarian perspective.
The Federal Ocean
A significant portion of the California coast that surfers use is federally administered beyond the state’s three nautical miles of jurisdiction, and even within state waters, federal designations including national marine sanctuaries, national monuments, and marine protected areas impose restrictions developed in Washington rather than Sacramento. These restrictions are administered by federal agencies whose accountability to California’s coastal residents is indirect at best — filtered through the federal bureaucratic hierarchy, congressional oversight committees, and presidential appointments rather than through the direct electoral accountability that state and local government provides to their constituents.
The Marine Protected Areas covering much of the California coast restrict fishing, certain diving activities, and in some configurations affect surface activities. The restrictions were developed through federal processes with public comment opportunities. They were ultimately decided by federal agency administrators whose careers are not accountable to the California surfer who now navigates around them. The distinction between a policy that the California electorate has approved through its elected representatives and a policy that a federal agency administrator has approved through a process the California electorate influenced at several removes is a distinction that matters for democratic accountability and for the likelihood that the policy reflects the preferences of the people most affected by it.
The Antiquities Act Problem
National monument designations using the Antiquities Act allow a president to create permanent restrictions on coastal and offshore areas without Congressional approval, creating use restrictions that are difficult to reverse and that were not subject to the democratic process that most major land use decisions require. The California surfer who benefits from a national monument that protects the marine ecosystem their wave breaks in is also subject to the executive authority that the monument designation represents — the authority of the federal executive to make permanent decisions about California’s coastal resources that California’s voters and representatives did not specifically authorise.
The protection and the power come from the same source. The protection can be welcomed while the power is questioned. The libertarian argument is not against coastal protection but for the accountability structure through which protection decisions are made. According to Reason, federal land administration and its accountability gaps have been analysed across multiple resource types. The Libertarian Institute covers federal land policy from consistent accountability principles. The argument for devolving coastal management authority to states and local governments is the argument for making the people who make decisions about California’s coast answerable to California’s residents.
Decentralisation as Accountability
Devolving more coastal management authority to states and local governments would produce management frameworks that differ significantly between California and other coastal states — which is the point. California’s coastal residents and their elected representatives have specific values about what the coast is for: public access, environmental protection, sustainable recreation, and commercial fishing compatible with the marine ecosystem. These values are not uniformly shared across the country, and federal ocean management that attempts to balance them with the preferences of inland states without coastal interests produces compromises that serve no coastal community optimally. State management with federal baseline standards for water quality and species protection could produce better outcomes for California’s specific coastal culture than the current federal administrative model. It would also produce better accountability when management decisions are wrong, because the officials making them would be answerable to California voters rather than to a federal administrative hierarchy that California’s residents cannot practically hold accountable through electoral mechanisms.
The case for devolving federal coastal management authority to states is strongest when it focuses on the specific accountability gap rather than on the general preference for smaller government. The accountability gap is real and specific: federal decisions about California’s coast are made by people who are not accountable to California’s voters, and there is no effective mechanism for California’s electorate to hold federal coastal managers accountable for decisions that harm California’s coastal communities. State and local governments have this accountability relationship. When a California Coastal Commission decision is bad, California voters can elect politicians who will appoint different commissioners. When a federal marine sanctuary policy is bad, California voters have no comparable mechanism. This is the democratic argument for devolution, and it is the argument most likely to be persuasive across the political spectrum because it rests on accountability principles that both libertarians and non-libertarians value.
The California coast at dawn, before the parking meters activate and the administrative machinery of coastal management begins its daily operations, is one of the finest available demonstrations of what freedom looks like in practice: the water does not require a permit, the waves do not charge for access, and the only rules that matter are the physics of fluid dynamics and the informal norms of the lineup. The rest — the fees, the designations, the regulations, the mandates — is the accumulated product of political choices made over decades by people who were not primarily thinking about what the surfer needs from a relationship with the state. The surfer who has paddled through the administrative barnacles to reach the lineup has done the work that liberty requires: navigating the gap between what the state allows and what the ocean offers, finding the freedom that exists between the regulations, and choosing the ocean over the paperwork every time the swell is worth it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
