The California Coastal Commission’s legal interpretation of San Luis Obispo County’s local coastal plan sealed two Cambria landowners’ victory in a lawsuit over coastal development permits.
The commission’s decision to deny their permits and the ensuing litigation set back property owners Alireza Hadian’s and Ralph Bookout’s retirement home builds by two-plus years.
“When a powerful state agency without having authority, arbitrarily decides which paying water customer in Cambria is entitled to his water and which one isn’t, you know it is not right,” Hadian said. “I worked hard and saved enough to be able to build my home, but I have no money left and no income, so the impact has been devastating financially.”
Over 2019 and 2020, Hadian and Bookout applied for permits to construct single-family homes on their neighboring properties in Cambria. But a group of private residents and two coastal commissioners appealed the county-approved permits to the commission. Hearings in 2021 resulted in commission staff finding faults with SLO County’s local coastal plan’s conformance with its water provision and environmentally sensitive habitat area (ESHA) issues. Staff recommended that commissioners take jurisdiction over the permits and deny them, resulting in Hadian and Bookout filing a complaint for inverse condemnation against the agency in 2022.
Inverse condemnation can be a remedy for property owners when a government takes or damages a property for public use without initiating eminent domain proceedings, according to Cornell Law School. The property owner has to show that the government’s taking deprived the owner of the economic value of their property or that it failed to promote substantial government interests.
The Coastal Commission ignored its predecessors’ interpretation of the county’s local coastal plan, SLO Superior Court Judge Michael Kelley wrote in his December 2024 ruling.
“Although the commission identified six factors supporting the existence of a substantial issue, as it related to the five factors that were related to water resource issues, all of them hinged on the commission’s legal conclusion that the [local coastal plan] required the county to determine that there was an ‘adequate sustainable water supply’ for what the commission characterized as the new development contemplated by the [permits],” Kelley wrote. “This legal conclusion is not correct.”
Hadian and Bookout—represented pro bono by Pacific Legal Foundation—successfully argued that the homes proposed for land they’ve long owned didn’t qualify as new development.
Their parcels lie within a 382-acre tract, a portion of which later became a clustered subdivision bearing 18 lots including Hadian’s and Bookout’s properties. In 1969, former tract owner the Walter H. Leimert Company entered an agreement with the Cambria County Water District to supply water to the then unbroken land.
When the Leimert Company eventually pursued subdivision, then commission Assistant District Director David Loomis wrote in a 1995 letter that the boundary and water and sewer lines provided by the water district’s successor—Cambria Community Services District (CCSD)—predate the local coastal plan.
In June 2000, the CCSD issued a will-serve letter to the tract documenting its readiness to serve water to the lots. By 2001, all potential residential lots, including Hadian’s and Bookout’s, were connected to the water system with meters and immediately began being billed for the services.
While concerns over limited water supply caused the county to impose a moratorium on new development in 2001, a change occurred in 2007. In its local coastal plan, the county formalized that longtime landowners who were paying water customers before the moratorium went into effect would be exempt from the buildout restriction.
“I wasn’t allowed, I was told by the commission, even though my water meter was already connected before the moratorium, and I was a ratepayer customer of the CCSD for the past 25 years!” Hadian said.
The landowners also pushed back on Coastal Commission allegations that construction would harm an environmentally sensitive Monterey pine forest. Appellants didn’t raise this issue, but the commissioners included it as a problem in their decision to deny the permits.
“[It] really meant that they were able to add additional potential grounds, kind of to shore up, potentially, the assertion of jurisdiction, but it also meant that Al and Ralph had no opportunity to respond because they were never on notice that that was a potential grounds of appeal,” Hadian and Bookout’s attorney Jeremy Talcott told New Times.
The superior court ruling said that the potential environmental issues were addressed more than 25 years ago, requiring extensive mitigation measures like replacing felled pine trees at a 4:1 ratio. Ninety percent of the sprawling tract was also reserved to be open space.
Talcott is unsure if the Coastal Commission will appeal the ruling. Commission attorney Elizabeth St. John didn’t respond to New Times‘ request for comment. With Talcott heading its coastal lands rights project, Pacific Legal Foundation frequently comes face-to-face with the commission. Currently, he’s working on two other cases with SLO County residents who are up against the commission.
For Hadian, the slow pace of the law proved to be costly. When the county first approved his permit in 2019, construction costs stood at $250 per square foot. Today, the same house costs $750 per square foot to build complete with an interest rate between 8 and 10 percent.
“My biggest challenge is to come up with the capital needed to build, but I am determined to start construction as soon as possible,” Hadian said. Δ
This article appears in Volunteers 2025.
It is a pipe dream but maybe we’ll see the day that a property owner can seek damages against those who file appeals against their fully legal projects. Neighbors who ‘got theirs first’ hide behind made up concern for the environment, despite also living in homes that impacted the trees around them and pull from the water supply just as any other lot with a service agreement, all in an attempt to make their public area an exclusive community. Even though Bookout and Hadian were able to stick it out and overturn the appeal, those neighbors still achieved their goal of delaying the project and increasing its cost by 300%. The CCC commissioners and the neighbors who filed the appeals should be ashamed, especially in times where each new housing unit counts towards providing sustainable living for every Californian.