The 33,000 Dollar Fee for a Beach Path That Does Not Exist

For decades, building at Hollister Ranch has required an in-lieu payment toward public access, and the access has yet to be provided

Hollister Ranch In-Lieu Fee: Paying the State for a Service It Has Not Delivered

If a private company collected a charge for decades toward a product it never supplied, there would be a word for it. When a government does so, the word is policy.

At Hollister Ranch on the Santa Barbara County coast, the Coastal Act contains a special provision. Owners who obtain a coastal development permit to build must pay an in-lieu fee toward a public access program. A 2021 Coastal Commission staff report on one such permit sets out the mechanism: the public access requirement at the ranch has been administered through conditions on individual permits; the law specifies how the fee is assessed; and the amount is thirty-three thousand dollars per permit, adjusted annually for inflation by the consumer price index.

The same report describes the provision of public access at the ranch as a significant coastal issue. It remains, at the time of that document, unprovided.

How the Arrangement Came About

The logic was straightforward. The legislature wanted the public to reach the beaches. The ranch had been subdivided into large parcels whose owners wished to build. Instead of requiring each owner to dedicate a path, which would have produced a patchwork, the law called for a single access program funded in part by fees paid as each parcel was developed.

A public television account of the dispute put the result plainly. For decades the owners have paid these fees and built their homes, it noted, while the program the fees were meant to support went unimplemented. At one commission meeting, a commissioner declared that either the ranch would provide access or the commission would interpret the law to mean no future development there.

The Property-Rights Objection

From a libertarian perspective, the in-lieu fee is an exaction: a payment demanded as a condition of permission to use one’s own land. American law permits exactions within limits. The Supreme Court held in a California coastal case in 1987 that a condition on a building permit must have an essential connection to a harm the project causes. Later rulings added that the burden must be roughly proportional and that the same rules apply to demands for money.

Whether a flat fee per permit, unrelated to the size or location of the house, meets that standard is a fair legal question. A cabin on a ridge a mile from the sea does not obviously block anyone’s path to the water.

The Accountability Objection

Set the constitutional issue aside and a simpler problem remains. Fees have been collected. The access has not been built. Any payer is entitled to ask where the money is, what it has been spent on and when the thing it was for will exist. That is a question about government performance, and it should trouble supporters of public access as much as it troubles property owners.

The Case for the Fee

Defenders make reasonable arguments. The subdivision of a long stretch of coast into private parcels did foreclose public use that might otherwise have developed, and each new home entrenches that. A modest payment toward a shared access solution is less intrusive than demanding an easement across every lot. Thirty-three thousand dollars is small against the value of the property. And the delay, they say, is largely the result of the owners’ association resisting implementation at every stage.

They also note that the owners accepted these terms. Nobody was compelled to build. Permits were sought and the conditions were known.

Leverage, Not Revenue

The commissioner’s remark about halting development reveals what the fee has become. Its total yield over four decades is trivial against the cost of acquiring and operating access across a fourteen-thousand-acre ranch. Its function is leverage. The state holds the permit. The owner wants it. The condition is the price of peace.

That is an uncomfortable way to run land-use policy. It converts a question of public finance, how much access is worth and who should pay, into a contest of patience. It rewards whoever can wait longest. And it leaves the supposed beneficiary, the member of the public who would like to see the coast, with nothing.

A Cleaner Alternative

An honest approach would separate the two matters. If new construction imposes costs on the public, charge a fee calibrated to those costs and account for it. If the public wants a route to the beach, appropriate the funds, pay the owners of the road for an easement and open it. Each transaction would be visible and each party would know what it was getting.

Critics will say the legislature will never appropriate enough. That may be true. But it is an admission that voters, asked to pay the real price, might decline, and that the current system exists to avoid asking them.

What Surfers Should Take From This

Surfers tend to distrust both gates and bureaucracies. This case offers reasons for both instincts. A private association has kept people off a public shore. A public agency has collected money for access and not delivered it. Neither has covered itself in glory.

The useful response is to insist on plain accounting from each. From the owners: what would you accept for the easement? From the state: where did the fees go, and what is the date? Until those questions are answered in numbers, the argument will remain what it has been for forty years.

On a Lighter Note

Britain has its own tradition of paying a public body for improvements that arrive late or not at all. The London Prat sends it up in its English satirical news on planning fees and UK satirical news about Section 106. Bohiney Magazine offers the American counterpart.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/