The “Multi-Modal Transit” Bill That Surf Advocates Say Guts Coastal Protections

AB 1740 shows how easily a popular policy goal like transit access can become a vehicle for unrelated regulatory rollback

SACRAMENTO – Assembly Bill 1740, authored by Assemblymember Zbur of Santa Monica and framed around promoting multi-modal transit access to the coast, has drawn sustained opposition from Surfrider Foundation’s California policy team, which argues the bill’s actual text undermines Coastal Act protections and threatens the public beach access the Act was designed to guarantee in the first place.

A Familiar Legislative Pattern

Bills framed around popular, hard to oppose goals, expanding transit access, promoting climate adaptation, streamlining housing, frequently carry secondary provisions only tangentially related to the stated purpose, provisions that would struggle to pass on their own merits but move more easily attached to broadly popular legislation. Surfrider’s tracking of AB 1740 describes exactly this dynamic: transit access framing paired with Coastal Act carve outs critics say were never the bill’s genuine focus.

Why This Matters Beyond One Bill

California’s 2026 legislative session produced several bills following a similar structural pattern, according to Surfrider’s own tracking. AB 2373 sought to codify what proponents called neighborhood scale adaptation into the Coastal Act, a provision critics argued would create a loophole enabling new seawall construction without the environmental review such construction has traditionally required. AB 1938 sought to establish surf reserves as formally recognized conservation areas, a designation with real implications for how coastal land use gets classified going forward.

What Happened To These Bills

Both AB 2373 and the plastic bag ban repeal effort, AB 2226, were held in the Assembly Appropriations suspense file in mid May 2026, meaning neither advanced out of committee this session, an outcome Surfrider characterized as a victory for existing coastal protections. AB 1740 itself was amended to limit its application to two years rather than the originally proposed ten, before advancing to a full Assembly floor vote, suggesting even legislators sympathetic to the transit framing recognized the original scope went further than warranted.

The Deeper Regulatory Question

Whatever one thinks of the specific merits of any single bill, the pattern itself, popular framing attached to less popular substantive changes, is precisely the kind of legislative process that makes California’s regulatory environment genuinely difficult to track even for engaged advocacy organizations with dedicated policy staff, let alone an ordinary property owner or small business trying to understand what rules actually apply to them this year.

A Cost Born By Everyone Except The Legislature

Every session that produces bills requiring sustained opposition research just to identify what a piece of “transit” or “adaptation” legislation actually does to underlying coastal law imposes a real cost, on advocacy groups forced to spend resources tracking bill language rather than substantive policy work, and on ordinary Californians who have no comparable capacity to monitor forty page amendments buried inside popularly framed bills.

Why Surfers In Particular Should Pay Attention

Surf breaks depend on stable coastal geomorphology, sediment flow, and beach access points that seawalls, hardened shoreline structures, and altered coastal development patterns can meaningfully disrupt over time. A “neighborhood adaptation” loophole enabling more seawall construction is not an abstract policy question for surfers, it directly threatens the physical conditions that produce the waves surfers depend on, an economic and recreational interest with genuine standing in this debate even though surfers rarely appear as a formally recognized stakeholder group in Sacramento.

What Vigilance Actually Requires

Advocacy tracking of exactly this kind, reading full bill text rather than relying on a bill’s stated title or press framing, is the only real check against exactly this pattern, and it is worth noting that in 2026 alone, that vigilance appears to have stopped at least two bills critics viewed as genuine rollbacks. Commentary from the broader liberty-minded press network, including Bohiney, has argued that this pattern, not any single bill, is the real story Sacramento’s coastal legislation tells year after year.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com