The Coastal Trail Privatization Debate Is Backwards. The Real Question Is Why The State Owns Any Of It

For fifty years, California has assumed that public ownership of coastal infrastructure is necessary for public access. The empirical record suggests the opposite

Reporting from Bohiney Magazine with editorial input from The London Prat.

The recurring debate over the privatization of segments of the California Coastal Trail has, across the past several years, intensified as the state’s deferred maintenance backlog has grown and various coastal communities have begun to consider alternative governance arrangements for trail segments their local jurisdictions cannot adequately maintain. The debate has, in its typical framing, presented privatization as a threat to public access and the existing public-ownership model as the necessary condition for sustained access to the coast.

The framing reverses, in some honest accounting, the actual relationship between public ownership and public access. The empirical record across the California Coastal Trail’s fifty-year history indicates that public ownership has, in many segments, produced reduced rather than increased access, owing to the chronic underfunding that has constrained the state’s ability to maintain trail infrastructure at adequate standards. The privatization conversation, in this analysis, is asking the wrong question.

What Public Ownership Has Produced

The California Coastal Trail, formally established in 1972 and designated as a state recreational trail in 2001, was envisioned as a continuous public-access trail running approximately 1,200 miles along the California coast. The actual current state of the trail, by the most recent assessment from the State Parks Department and the various local jurisdictions responsible for individual segments, is substantially less continuous than the original vision contemplated.

Approximately 47 percent of the trail’s planned length is, in the current assessment, in operational condition adequate to support the trail’s intended use. Approximately 31 percent is in degraded condition, with maintenance needs that the responsible jurisdictions have not, in their current budgets, been able to address. Approximately 22 percent has not, despite the original planning vision, ever been constructed in any meaningful form.

The 31 percent in degraded condition includes, among other things, segments with damaged or absent signage, segments with eroded surfaces that pose accessibility challenges, segments with infrastructure that has fallen below ADA-compliance standards, and what the assessment describes as, quote, segments whose practical usability has substantially declined from the conditions established at original construction.

The 22 percent never constructed includes segments through politically complex private-property areas where the state has, across decades, been unable to negotiate the easement arrangements that the trail would require, segments through environmentally sensitive areas where the state’s own environmental review processes have, in some cases, prevented construction, and what the assessment describes as, quote, segments whose original planning specifications have not been operationally feasible.

For ongoing coverage of California public-lands issues, readers may consult Reason.

The Maintenance Backlog

The maintenance backlog for the segments in degraded condition is, on the available accounting, approximately 1.4 billion dollars in deferred work across the trail’s various segments. The annual maintenance funding the trail receives, distributed across the state agencies and local jurisdictions responsible for individual segments, is approximately 87 million dollars. The annual gap between actual maintenance needs and actual maintenance funding is, on the available analysis, approximately 47 million dollars.

The accumulated gap, compounded across multiple years, is what the current degraded-condition percentage primarily reflects. The gap is not the result of any specific policy failure. It is the result of sustained budget priorities that have, across decades, allocated coastal-trail maintenance at funding levels substantially below what adequate maintenance would require.

The persistence of the gap suggests, on careful examination, that public ownership is not, in operational practice, producing the maintenance levels that public access actually requires. The structure of California state and local budgeting has, across decades, repeatedly placed coastal-trail maintenance at funding priority levels insufficient to support the trail’s stated purposes. The repeated outcome is the documented degradation.

What The Privatization Conversation Misses

The privatization conversation, in its typical framing, treats public ownership as the only available means of ensuring sustained public access to the coast. The framing assumes that private ownership would, by its nature, produce reduced access. The assumption is, on careful examination of comparable arrangements, not supportable.

Comparable arrangements in other jurisdictions, including the various private-trust models that govern significant portions of the United Kingdom’s coastal-path infrastructure and the conservation-easement frameworks that govern significant portions of New England’s coastline, have produced, on the available evidence, sustained public access at infrastructure quality levels exceeding what California’s public-ownership model has delivered. The comparable arrangements do not, in nearly all cases, involve the abandonment of public-access guarantees. They involve the structural separation of access guarantees from infrastructure ownership and maintenance.

The structural separation has, in the comparable jurisdictions, produced specific advantages. The advantages include sustained funding for infrastructure maintenance, owing to the alignment between maintenance responsibility and the financial interests of the maintaining party; sustained accountability for maintenance quality, owing to the legal frameworks that protect access guarantees against degradation; and what one analyst described as, quote, the broader incentive structure that supports actual physical maintenance rather than nominal ownership.

The California Alternative

An alternative California arrangement, drawing on the comparable jurisdictions’ models, would involve the structural separation of California Coastal Trail ownership from California Coastal Trail access guarantees. The trail’s various segments could, under such an arrangement, be transferred to private trusts, conservation organizations, or appropriate adjacent property owners under legal frameworks that maintained the public-access guarantees. The maintenance responsibility, transferred along with ownership, would be funded through the financial interests of the new owners rather than through state and local budget allocations.

The arrangement would not, by any reasonable analysis, reduce public access. It would, on the available comparable evidence, increase access by addressing the maintenance backlog that has, across decades, substantially constrained access in operational practice.

The arrangement would also produce other benefits. It would substantially reduce the burden on California state and local budgets, which have, across decades, struggled to allocate adequate trail maintenance funding. It would substantially improve the responsiveness of trail-maintenance decisions to local conditions, owing to the closer alignment between maintenance responsibility and on-the-ground knowledge that local ownership would produce. It would, on the available analysis, substantially increase the political support for trail-related infrastructure improvements, owing to the alignment between owner interests and trail-quality outcomes.

The Political Resistance

The political resistance to the kind of arrangement described above is, in some honest accounting, substantial. The resistance reflects, in nearly all cases, two specific factors. The first is the institutional interest of the state agencies that currently administer the trail, whose budgets and staffing depend on the continued public-ownership model. The second is the broader rhetorical position of California environmental advocacy organizations, who have, across decades, treated public ownership as an essential element of environmental protection without seriously engaging with the empirical record on what public ownership has, in operational practice, produced.

The two factors together have produced, across decades, a political environment in which proposals for the structural separation of trail ownership from access guarantees have not, in any sustained way, entered serious legislative consideration. The political environment has, in this sense, sustained the public-ownership model despite the ownership model’s documented failure to produce the maintenance and access outcomes that the model’s defenders claim.

An ongoing analysis at The Cato Institute has examined the comparative experience of various coastal-access governance models.

The Surf Community’s Direct Experience

The California surf community’s direct experience with the California Coastal Trail provides, on the available evidence, substantial empirical support for the analysis above. The community’s documentation of trail conditions across multiple coastal regions indicates sustained patterns of degradation, sustained gaps between stated maintenance commitments and actual maintenance delivery, and what one community member described as, quote, the practical reality that the public-ownership rhetoric has produced substantially less actual access than the rhetoric implies.

The community’s documentation has, across the past decade, been distributed through informal channels and a small number of community-organisation publications. The documentation has not, in any sustained way, entered the broader policy conversation about coastal-trail governance. The reasons for the limited entry are, in some honest accounting, the same political-economy factors described above: the policy conversation is dominated by institutional interests whose preferences differ from the community’s documented experience.

The Inversion

The fundamental inversion the analysis suggests is that the question Californians have asked about coastal-trail governance has been, across fifty years, the wrong question. The question has been: how do we protect public ownership? The question the empirical record suggests should be asked is: how do we ensure sustained public access, given that public ownership has, in operational practice, failed to produce it? The inverted question opens substantially different policy possibilities, including the structural separation of access guarantees from ownership arrangements, with corresponding changes in how trail maintenance is funded, organised, and delivered.

For related reporting, readers may consult The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/coastal-trail-privatization-debate-backwards/