California’s Coastal Commission Tells Surfers What They Already Know: The Government Owns the Wave

How the State’s Most Powerful Unelected Agency Controls Every Grain of Sand on the California Coast and Why Surfers Should Care

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

The California Coastal Commission was created in 1976 to protect the coast from development. Forty-nine years later, it has grown into a regulatory organism so comprehensive and so powerful that it controls not only what can be built within the coastal zone but who can walk on the beach, where you can park to access it, whether a homeowner can replace a fence post, and increasingly, the conditions under which any human activity near saltwater is permitted to occur. It is, in the specific vocabulary of libertarian political analysis, a regulatory state in miniature: an unelected commission with quasi-judicial powers, a staff of hundreds, and a mandate broad enough to justify almost any intervention it chooses to undertake.

The Surfer’s Relationship With Regulation

Surfers have a complicated relationship with the Coastal Commission. On one hand, the commission has been a crucial defender of coastal public access, fighting the private landowners who have historically tried to block beach access, fence off coastal paths, and privatize the shoreline that California law says belongs to everyone. The famous battles over Surfer’s Point in Ventura, the Hollister Ranch access dispute, and the ongoing conflicts over staircase access in Malibu are cases where the commission’s power has been exercised on the side of surfers and against the wealthy property owners who would prefer their stretch of Pacific remained exclusive.

On the other hand, the commission has been expanding its jurisdiction in ways that go well beyond its original mandate, into the regulation of activities, events, and uses of the coastal zone that the 1976 Coastal Act’s framers did not anticipate and would not have sanctioned. The permit requirements for surf competitions, the conditions attached to coastal development permits that affect surfing access, and the commission’s position on coastal armoring — the seawalls and rock revetments that property owners use to protect their buildings from erosion and that critics argue accelerate the erosion of the beaches that protect them — all affect the practical experience of surfing in California in ways that regulation increasingly shapes.

The Public Access Paradox

The California Constitution guarantees public access to the wet sand beach. The area above the mean high-tide line is private property, which is where the legal conflicts concentrate: the path from the road to the wet sand, which must cross private property, is the access point that property owners have repeatedly tried to close and that the commission and the courts have repeatedly defended as a public right of way. The recent expansion of this doctrine — recognizing historical public use of specific paths and trails as establishing prescriptive easements — has been one of the commission’s more substantive public goods, ensuring that beaches that have been used by surfers and the public for generations remain accessible even when the upland property changes hands.

The libertarian position on coastal access is more nuanced than the simple anti-regulation frame suggests: the property rights that libertarians defend include the public property rights established by the public trust doctrine, which holds that the state holds certain natural resources in trust for the public and cannot alienate them to private parties. The ocean, the wet sand, and the air above them are public trust resources. The question is not whether these should be protected but how that protection is best administered — through the current commission structure or through a reformed approach that maintains the public access mandate while reducing the regulatory overreach that has made the commission one of the most criticized agencies in California government.

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The fundamental question for California’s future is whether the state’s political institutions can produce the reforms that would allow it to retain the people, the enterprises, and the economic dynamism that have made it extraordinary, or whether the regulatory and fiscal burden will continue to produce the exit that the exit tax is designed to prevent rather than address. The libertarian answer is clear: reduce the burden, reform the regulation, and trust that people who are free to stay and free to go will stay when the conditions justify staying. California has everything else. The question is whether it can develop the political will to fix what it has broken.

California’s coast and its freedom culture are worth defending precisely because they represent what is best about the state: the natural abundance, the diverse community, the economic dynamism, and the specific form of liberty that comes from choosing to live close to something larger than human concerns. The waves don’t care about regulations. The people who surf them do, and should.

The specific reforms that would make California’s coast more free without sacrificing its protection are identifiable and achievable: streamline the Coastal Commission’s permitting process to reduce delay without reducing review; apply constitutional due process standards to the commission’s quasi-judicial functions; fund coastal restoration through the agencies whose decisions created the degradation; reform CEQA to prevent litigation abuse while preserving genuine environmental review; and ensure that coastal access is both legally guaranteed and practically affordable for Californians of all incomes. These reforms require political will that California’s current political environment has not yet produced, but that the surfer community — which is large, organized, economically diverse, and geographically distributed across the state’s most politically consequential coastal constituencies — is positioned to demand.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/