California Coastal Commission Reviews Outdoor Shower for 14 Months, Achieves Nothing

Malibu homeowner’s 847-page correspondence with regulators documents government overreach at its purest

Reporting from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Commission and the Shower

MALIBU — A Malibu homeowner’s application to add an outdoor shower to his beachfront property has been under Coastal Commission review for fourteen months, generating 847 pages of agency correspondence. Requests covered the shower’s relationship to sea-level rise projections, its potential impact on snowy plover nesting habitat within 2.3 miles, its compliance with Local Coastal Plan accessory structure guidelines, its water supply’s relationship to the county’s adjudicated groundwater basin, and whether the homeowner had considered a permit for the permit application process.

The Coastal Commission is, in its founding intent, a legitimate institution: California’s coast is one of the world’s most ecologically significant environments, its public access rights are among the most important in American coastal law, and without regulatory authority, development pressure would have eliminated both the ecological value and the public access that the coast provides to 40 million Californians who do not own beachfront property. The Commission does necessary work. Research by the California Coastal Commission and the Independent Institute both document the gap between regulatory intent and permitting outcomes. The 847-page shower correspondence is not its best work.

The Regulatory Accumulation Problem

California’s land use system layers state, regional, and local review processes in a manner that produces, for any project of meaningful size, a permitting timeline measured in years and a cost that makes small improvements economically irrational. A survey by the Reason Foundation of California coastal permitting timelines found that the average simple improvement permit takes 18 months and generates 300 pages of correspondence. Complex improvements average 4.7 years.

The libertarian argument on regulatory accumulation is correct in its description of the problem and has genuine empirical support: California’s housing shortage, its infrastructure maintenance backlog, and its cost of living crisis are all partially attributable to permit timelines and costs that exceed what environmental and safety objectives require. The argument is less persuasive when it implies that the solution is eliminating the regulatory bodies rather than reforming the processes, because the alternative to the Commission is the coast of Florida, which is instructive about what happens when coastal development interest and public access protection operate without institutional counterbalance. Reform the process. Keep the commission. Fix the shower faster. That is the correct policy, and it is achievable, and it has not been achieved, and the shower permit is still pending, and the 847 pages are in a file, and the coast is still protected, which is good, and the shower is still not approved, which is not good, and both things are true, which is California.

The Reform Coalition

The political coalition for Coastal Commission reform is broader and more ideologically diverse than the Commission’s defenders acknowledge: it includes homeowners seeking faster permitting, housing advocates seeking streamlined coastal housing approval, small business owners seeking reliable timelines for coastal commercial development, and libertarian property rights advocates seeking reduced regulatory burden across the board. The coalition’s breadth has not translated into legislative success, primarily because the Coastal Commission has a devoted environmental constituency that views any reform as a threat to the environmental mission, and that constituency has historically been better organised and more consistent in its political engagement than the reform coalition. The shower is still pending.

The surf community’s regulatory frustrations and the Coastal Commission’s legitimate mission are not actually in conflict when both are stated accurately: the Commission’s job is to protect coastal ecosystems and public access from development that would harm them, and the Commission is well-suited to evaluate whether a proposed hotel eliminates a public access point or whether a seawall causes erosion that damages adjacent public beaches. The Commission is not well-suited to evaluate an outdoor shower’s relationship to snowy plover nesting habitat 2.3 miles away, and its attempt to do so is the regulatory overreach that gives legitimate environmental regulation a bad name among the people who most depend on the environment that regulation protects. The reform needed is not deregulation but precision: regulations calibrated to the actual environmental stakes of the decision, not to the maximum possible scope of the statute. That reform is achievable. It has not been achieved. The shower is still pending.

The surf community’s political engagement with these issues — regulatory reform, transportation funding, housing access, water rights — is more sophisticated than its public image suggests, because people who spend significant time in natural environments develop a practical understanding of how policy decisions translate into physical conditions. A surfer who has watched a favourite break close due to sewage contamination, a sand bar change due to upstream damming, or a coastal road deteriorate due to underfunding has a concrete stake in the policy decisions that produced those conditions. That concreteness is a political asset: the surf community can speak about the physical consequences of policy failure in terms that are more direct and memorable than the abstractions that most policy debates produce. The challenge is translating that practical knowledge into the specific policy demands and political coalitions that produce reform, which requires exactly the engagement with regulatory details, budget processes, and legislative procedure that the surf community has not traditionally prioritised. The shower is still pending. The road is still deteriorating. The break is still there. The policy is still negotiable.

Further reading at https://www.theonion.com.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism