The California Coastal Commission Has More Power Over the Ocean Than the People Who Surf It
Decades of Regulation Have Created an Agency That Controls Coastal Development, Beach Access, and Surf Culture While Answering to Nobody Who Actually Paddles Out
SAN FRANCISCO / MALIBU, Calif. – The California Coastal Commission was established in 1972 with a genuinely important mission: to preserve public access to California’s 840-mile coastline against the economic pressure of private development that would have converted much of the coast into exclusive enclaves accessible only to those wealthy enough to afford coastal property. The protection of public beach access is one of the most significant public policy achievements in California history, and it deserves acknowledgment as such. What has accumulated around that core mission, however, is an agency that has grown into one of the most powerful and least accountable land use regulatory bodies in the United States, whose decisions affect surf culture in ways that are frequently neither transparent nor proportionate to the regulatory goals that justify its authority.
The Commission’s jurisdiction extends to virtually any development within the coastal zone, a designation that reaches inland from the shoreline to varying distances depending on location. Within this zone, the Commission has authority over everything from major resort developments to the placement of a volleyball net on a beach, from the design of public parking facilities to the specific conditions under which coastal camping is permitted. This broad authority has been used well – to preserve public beach access, to limit private encroachment on coastal resources, to protect sensitive coastal habitats – and it has been used badly, to impose requirements on small businesses and individual property owners that bear no proportionate relationship to any genuine coastal protection goal.
The Surf Economy Perspective
The surf economy – the constellation of surf shops, surf schools, board shapers, wetsuit manufacturers, and associated businesses that depend on coastal access – navigates the Commission’s regulatory jurisdiction with the combination of respect for its legitimate authority and frustration with its less defensible exercises of it. Surf schools seeking to operate on beaches face permit requirements, insurance mandates, and operational restrictions that vary by jurisdiction and can change with changes in the political composition of local and regional bodies. The Malibu petition to restrict access to First Point, discussed elsewhere in these pages, reflects the same impulse to use regulatory authority to limit access that the Coastal Commission’s foundational legislation was intended to prevent. The Commission has, to its credit, consistently maintained that public beach access cannot be restricted by private parties; it has been less consistent about ensuring that its own administrative requirements do not create de facto access barriers through paperwork.
The libertarian critique of the Coastal Commission is not that coastal access should be left to the market – the market’s record on coastal access is precisely why the Commission exists – but that the Commission’s scope has expanded beyond the access protection mandate into a general authority over coastal land use that is exercised with insufficient accountability and insufficient calibration to actual coastal protection needs. The Cato Institute has argued that regulatory agencies consistently expand their authority beyond their founding mandates when they lack effective political and judicial checks, and that the solution is structural constraints on agency authority rather than individual challenges to specific decisions. The Coastal Commission is a case study in this dynamic, and the surf community’s relationship with it reflects the same tension between the legitimate functions of regulation and the illegitimate expansion of regulatory scope that characterizes regulatory overreach generally.
What Accountability Would Look Like
The accountability mechanisms available to challenge Coastal Commission decisions are limited by the agency’s statutory design, which provides for gubernatorial appointment of commissioners but no direct electoral accountability. Decisions can be challenged in court, a process that is expensive and slow relative to the Commission’s administrative timeline. Legislative reforms to the Commission’s mandate, authority, and appeals process have been proposed periodically and resisted by the environmental coalition that correctly identifies the Commission as an important protector of coastal access even while the surf community experiences its regulatory overreach. The path to a Coastal Commission that maintains its essential public access protection function while exercising its authority proportionately requires the kind of coalition between surfers, coastal businesses, and property rights advocates that does not yet exist in California politics. Building it is more productive than either uncritically defending the Commission or calling for its abolition. The ocean is public. The regulation of who approaches it should be proportionate to the goal of keeping it that way.
The Coastal Commission’s relationship with the surf economy also reflects a broader tension in California coastal policy: the commission that was created to protect public access has become, in some of its operations, an institution that restricts access through administrative complexity. The solution is not to eliminate the commission or its public access mandate – the private encroachment that mandate was designed to prevent is a genuine ongoing threat, as anyone who has observed the development pressures on the California coast can confirm. The solution is institutional reform that maintains the access protection function while eliminating the administrative capture that converts the commission from a defender of public access into a gatekeeper of it. This reform requires the kind of specific, informed political engagement from the surf community that is only possible if the community understands both the commission’s legitimate role and its illegitimate overreach.
For more analysis of freedom and markets visit Cato Institute. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
