Access by Boat Only: What a Hollister Ranch Settlement Reveals About Who Government Bargains For

A deal that would have opened three-quarters of a mile of beach to those arriving by surfboard or kayak drew more than 1,500 objections, and a lesson in public choice

Hollister Ranch Settlement: A Lesson in How Public Rights Get Traded

When a government agency and a private association settle a lawsuit, the people most affected are usually not in the room. The 2018 agreement over Hollister Ranch is a clear example.

A public television report on the long dispute described its terms. The agreement amounted to a trade between different kinds of access. The owners would grant the public the right to reach three-quarters of a mile of the ranch’s eight and a half miles of beach, but only by boat: surfboard, paddleboard, kayak or soft-bottomed craft. The report added that more than 1,500 people emailed the Coastal Commission, most of them opposed, according to the agency’s executive director at a public meeting.

What Was Being Exchanged

The state had a decades-old claim to an overland route that it had never perfected. The owners had a decades-old interest in keeping the road private. The settlement would have swapped the uncertain land claim for a certain but very limited water access.

For a surfer with a boat or the stamina to paddle from Gaviota, little would have changed, since the tideland was already public. For a family without a boat, nothing would have changed either. They would still have been unable to get there.

The Public Choice View

Economists who study government behaviour would not be surprised. Public choice theory holds that agencies respond to concentrated interests more readily than to diffuse ones. A homeowners’ association with a common purpose, legal counsel and money is a concentrated interest. The general public, each member of which would visit the beach rarely if ever, is diffuse.

An agency facing years of costly litigation against such an opponent has an incentive to settle for something it can call a win. The deal need not be good for the public. It needs to end the case.

What upset the usual pattern here was that the diffuse interest organised. Fifteen hundred emails is a small number in a state of nearly forty million. It was enough to make the politics uncomfortable.

The Owners’ Rationale

The association’s reasoning should be stated fairly. Its members held that the state’s land claim was weak and would fail in court. Offering water access was, from their side, a concession, not an obligation. They argued that limited, low-impact arrival by sea protected a fragile coastline better than a public road would, and that the agreement gave the state something where a trial might have given it nothing.

That may even have been correct as a prediction of the litigation. A bird in the hand has value.

Why Critics Objected

Opponents saw it differently. In their view the state was giving away a statutory entitlement, the overland access program ordered in the early 1980s, in exchange for something the public largely already had. They also objected to the process: a settlement negotiated out of public view, presented for approval after the terms were fixed.

That procedural complaint is one libertarians should share. Whatever one thinks of the underlying claim, the disposal of public rights by private negotiation between officials and an interested party is how regulatory capture happens.

What Came After

The backlash had consequences. The legislature passed a measure setting deadlines for an access program, and agencies began a new planning process. A later conceptual plan, as local reporting described it, proposed overland access for up to 100 people a day in an initial phase, subject to a list of steps including acquiring rights to the ranch road, identifying a managing entity and building infrastructure. Readers should check with the agencies for the current state of implementation.

One hundred people a day on eight and a half miles of coast is not a crowd. It suggests that, even after the politics shifted, the outcome remained a negotiated minimum.

Rationing a Scarce Good

That raises an economic question the planners will have to face. If demand exceeds a cap of 100, how are places allocated? By lottery, by reservation system, by price? Each method has distributional effects. A free reservation system favours those with time and fast internet. A fee favours those with money but funds the program and reveals who values it most. A lottery is fair in one sense and arbitrary in another.

Markets ration by price. Governments ration by queue. Neither is costless.

The Broader Point

The Hollister settlement is a reminder that “the state” is not a single actor pursuing the public interest. It is a set of agencies with budgets, lawyers and a preference for closing files. Those who want an outcome from it, whether more access or stronger property protections, have to watch what it does on their behalf.

For surfers, there is a narrower lesson. The community that could already reach the waves by sea was offered a deal that formalised its own access and left everyone else out. Many surfers opposed it anyway. That is to their credit.

Elsewhere, With a Smile

Britain’s efforts to create a coastal path have produced their own compromises. The London Prat enjoys them in its UK satirical news on coastal access and British satirical news about committee compromises. Bohiney Magazine covers the American side.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/