Trestles Received A Seventy-Page Report From The Coastal Commission And No Decision, The Waves Were Not Consulted
The Planning Process For California’s Best Wave Has Now Consumed More Paper Than The Break Has Produced In Any Given Swell Window, With Less Resolution
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. London satirical journalism has covered Kafkaesque British planning processes for decades. The California surf version is compressed in time and expanded in irony.
CALIFORNIA – The Coastal Commission meeting on Trestles access produced a 70-page staff report, seventeen formal objections, and no binding decision. The follow-up session is scheduled for July. Lower Trestles, one of the finest point breaks in the continental United States, will continue operating as it always has – producing excellent waves when the Pacific cooperates and mediocre ones when it doesn’t – entirely indifferent to the committee process. The waves are not in the committee. The committee is not in the waves.
The Process As Obstruction
The trail to Trestles has been used by surfers for decades. It passes through San Onofre State Beach land adjacent to a military facility. The various competing interests – environmental groups, surf advocates, state parks, military access requirements, Coastal Commission oversight – have produced a planning situation in which a trail that existed before the planning system that now governs it has required, for fifteen years, continuous planning attention without reaching a stable resolution. The planning process has, in this case, become the obstruction rather than the mechanism for resolving competing claims.
The Surfer Community’s Specific Stake
The surfer community’s position on Trestles access is not anti-environmental. The community includes some of the most active advocates for coastal ecosystem protection in California. The community’s position is that the specific trail, to the specific break, has been used without measurable ecological harm for longer than the regulatory framework that now governs it, and that the regulatory framework’s failure to resolve the access question after fifteen years of process constitutes a failure of the process rather than a reason to continue the process. The Surfrider Foundation‘s position on the issue has evolved over the same period.
What Should Follow
The legislature should establish a statutory presumption of continued access for recreational trails to public beaches that have been in continuous use for more than twenty years and for which no documented environmental harm has been attributed to the access. The presumption would not prevent new restrictions where harm is demonstrated. It would prevent the current situation in which no harm is demonstrated and no resolution is achieved.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ | Further: Reason
