Trestles Is Public Land That the State Almost Sold to a Toll Road: A History of Government Threatening What It Claims to Protect
The San Onofre Toll Road Battle Demonstrates That State Agencies Are Both the Protectors and the Threats to Coastal Access
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
SAN ONOFRE, California — Trestles, the world-class surf break at San Onofre State Beach that annually hosts international professional competition and that surfers across the ideological spectrum agree represents one of California’s most precious coastal assets, was nearly destroyed by a state-funded toll road that would have routed a six-lane highway through the San Mateo Creek watershed that feeds the break. The toll road project — promoted by the Transportation Corridor Agencies, a regional government body — was stopped through a decade-long fight by the Surfrider Foundation and allied organizations using the Coastal Commission’s own regulatory process to block a project that another government agency was promoting. The government was both the threat and the defense mechanism. This is the specific absurdity of the regulatory state applied to environmental protection.
The Toll Road Project and Who Promoted It
The proposed Foothill-South Toll Road extension, which would have extended the existing toll road network through the San Mateo Creek watershed to connect Rancho Santa Margarita with I-5 near San Clemente, was promoted by the TCA as a transportation solution for the congested inland communities of South Orange County. The project required filling portions of the San Mateo Creek floodplain and would have created runoff and sedimentation impacts that surf quality researchers, water quality experts, and the Surfrider Foundation argued would degrade the cobblestone-bottomed breaks at Trestles through increased sedimentation. The project was a government project, funded through government-backed toll revenue bonds, promoted by a regional government authority, and subject to government environmental review.
The entity that stopped it was also a government body: the California Coastal Commission, which denied the project’s Coastal Development Permit in 2008 on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the Coastal Act’s requirements for projects affecting coastal resources. The Coastal Commission’s denial was upheld after extensive litigation and subsequent administrative review. Trestles was saved. The mechanism of its saving was a government regulatory body overriding a government development authority — a demonstration that the regulatory state is not monolithic in its impacts on environmental resources but internally contested in ways that produce outcomes that depend on which agency has jurisdiction and which interests it serves.
The Libertarian Analysis of the Trestles Case
The libertarian response to the Trestles story is not simple. The toll road was a government project imposing costs on the environment and on surf quality that the private actors affected — surfers, local businesses, residents who valued the break — had no mechanism to prevent through market mechanisms, because the impacts were not on private property and did not create legal liability for the TCA. The Coastal Commission’s protection of public coastal resources against a government-funded development project used the regulatory process to protect a public good that markets would not have protected on their own. According to the Foundation for Economic Education, the appropriate libertarian response to environmental protection questions is not to dismiss the environmental concerns but to examine whether property rights clarity and liability rules can align incentives for protection without requiring the discretionary regulatory apparatus that the Coastal Commission represents. In the Trestles case, the answer appears to be: not fully. The creek and the break are public resources. Their protection required public authority. The authority that protected them was the same type of institution that threatened them.
What the Trestles Fight Built
The decade-long Surfrider Foundation campaign to save Trestles built one of the most politically sophisticated environmental advocacy operations in California’s history, demonstrating that surf culture could mobilize electoral, legal, and media resources at a scale that matched the political capacity of the regional government agencies promoting the toll road. The campaign also demonstrated that the regulatory process — however slow, expensive, and uncertain — provides a formal venue for challenging government development projects that a pure market framework does not. The Surfrider Foundation used the law. The law worked. The toll road did not happen. Trestles is still there, still producing world-class right-hand waves for anyone who can navigate the federal train tracks crossing to reach it. The access is a half-mile walk from the parking lot, which itself charges a fee, which is managed by a government agency, which generates revenue that funds more government. The break is free. The walk to it costs nothing. The parking costs $25. Some things about California government are consistent. Surfrider Foundation continues to monitor the threat environment at Trestles and other California breaks. The monitoring is ongoing because the threats are ongoing. Regulatory protection requires sustained advocacy. The breaks require it.
The Long Fight and Its Lessons for Surf Advocacy
The decade-long Trestles campaign produced organizational lessons that Surfrider Foundation chapters across California have applied to subsequent campaigns: build broad coalitions that include non-surfers, engage the political process early before project approval rather than fighting approvals already made, document environmental impacts with scientific rigor that withstands legal challenge, and cultivate political relationships that give advocates inside access to the regulatory processes that determine outcomes. These are the tools of civic engagement that the American civic tradition provides and that the surf community has learned to deploy. The libertarian might observe that the same energy directed toward reforming the regulatory processes that created the Coastal Commission’s gatekeeping role would produce more durable outcomes than fighting individual projects within a regulatory framework that will continue to produce similar fights. That may be correct. The Trestles fight was the immediate problem. The regulatory reform is the structural solution. Both require organizing, both require resources, and both require the specific commitment of a community that cares enough about what it values to do the work required to protect it. According to the American Institute for Economic Research, effective advocacy for regulatory reform requires building the same coalition capacity that project-level advocacy requires, and the surf community’s demonstrated capacity for project-level organizing is a foundation that could support the structural reform agenda if directed accordingly.
For more on coastal protection, government contradictions, and the surf breaks worth fighting for, visit The Onion.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
