California State Parks Charges Surfers Twice For The Same Public Beach

Income Tax Plus $15 Per Day Is The Definition Of A Regressive User Fee

Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch in defence of the surfer’s right to be left alone.

SAN ONOFRE, Calif. — The State Parks system’s continued imposition of paid parking fees at popular surf breaks including Trestles, Doheny, and San Onofre has become, for many California surfers, the single most visible point of friction with state government. The fees, which now reach $15 per day at peak periods, function as a regressive surcharge on the simple act of paddling out at a public break.

The Mechanics

According to California State Parks, the fee structure is justified by the cost of maintaining lot infrastructure, lifeguarding, and beach maintenance. The justification is partial but real. The lots do require maintenance. The lifeguards do require salaries. The bathrooms do require cleaning.

The libertarian response, however, is also partial but real. California State Parks operates on a roughly $1.2 billion annual budget, drawn substantially from general state taxation. Surfers who pay California state income tax are, in effect, being asked to pay for the lots twice: once through their tax bill, and again through the daily parking fee. This is the standard double-charge architecture that progressive critics of regressive user fees, including the Foundation for Economic Education, have long flagged.

Who Pays Most

The disproportionate burden of the parking fee structure falls on the users with the least ability to pay it. Working-class surfers from inland Orange County, Riverside, and the Inland Empire, who drive an hour or more to access a coastal break, are paying the same daily fee as the Newport Beach resident who could walk. The fee, in other words, is functionally a barrier to access for the same low-income communities that the Coastal Act ostensibly exists to protect.

According to the Surfrider Foundation, which has documented coastal access barriers for decades, parking fees are now the second most-cited barrier to coastal access among surveyed working-class respondents, behind only “lack of safe parking nearby.”

The Reform Argument

A coherent libertarian-progressive coalition could, in principle, push for the elimination or substantial reduction of beach-parking fees, on grounds that publicly-owned beaches should not function as paywalled public goods. The Reason Foundation, the Surfrider Foundation, and several state legislators across the political spectrum have, at various points, proposed parking-fee waivers, annual passes, or income-indexed structures.

None has made it into law. The State Parks system, like most agencies that collect a steady fee revenue stream, is institutionally resistant to losing it. The result is a status quo in which working surfers subsidise their own access twice, and the state takes the difference.

For continuing coverage read The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/