February 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the California Coastal Commission (CCC). The governing body’s role as planning commission for the 1,100 miles of California coastline was authorized by California voters in November 1972 with passage of Proposition 20. The initiative was launched after efforts to pass coastal protection legislation had been approved in the Assembly three times, only to fail each time in the state Senate.
Proposition 20, later codified by the state Legislature in 1976 as the Coastal Act, is the country’s strongest land use policy and has been used as a model in other countries including Chile and Australia. It gives the commission the power to approve or deny development projects within the narrow Coastal Zone with the goal of protecting views, wildlife, coastal water quality, and public access to California beaches for the benefit of all of the people of California—not just the billionaire class.
Coastal protection has been controversial since it was conceived amid furious public outcry following the 1969 Santa Barbara oil blowout, at a time when, in addition to offshore oil drilling, proposals for four-lane highways, high rise hotels, and nuclear power plants were being presented to local planning commissions throughout the state. Proposition 20’s vision was to establish consistent statewide policies to prevent overdevelopment of the coast. Its detractors term it an overreach of government on private property rights. Its supporters are often dismayed that it does not do more to prevent development.
The commission was designed to maintain a degree of independence through its appointing process. Four of the 12 commissioners are appointed respectively by the governor, the Senate pro tem, and the speaker of the Assembly. But the agency’s effectiveness has been hampered at times by deliberate underfunding of its operating budget, and its executive director has several times been targeted for removal by appointees representing development agendas.
Finally, in 2014 the commission increased its effectiveness when the Legislature granted it the power to levy administrative penalties. The muscle this provides means the commission no longer has to rely on other state and federal agencies for enforcement of violations. In more recent years, the long-overdue perspective of environmental justice has gained traction and guided coastal policy.
But climate change is bringing major challenges to coastal protection that the authors of Proposition 20 and the Coastal Act could not have foreseen and therefore included in its protective efforts. One such area is armoring the coast to stave off erosion of coastal bluffs where expensive homes have been built. The act allows such armoring but is ambiguous as to its financing and when such efforts should be abandoned.
Still, the Coastal Act and Coastal Commission have had many successes. Shortly before he retired, in an interview with Earth Alert, the late longtime Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas stated, “Most of the things that have been achieved under the Coastal Act are the things you don’t see. It’s the access that hasn’t been lost, the wetlands that haven’t been filled, the views that haven’t been destroyed, the second home subdivisions that haven’t been allowed, and the agricultural lands that haven’t been destroyed.”
If the coast, what Douglas termed “the geographic soul” of California, is to remain the place where the many, rather than the few, can enjoy recreation and restoration, it continues to need the involvement of the public. For as Douglas often said, “The coast is never saved. It’s always being saved.” Δ
Janet Bridgers is the co-founder and president of Earth Alert. Send a response for publication via letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Feb 9-19, 2023.
Ah 1972! Let’s remember who was the Governor of our great state at the time of the CCC formation, and who was in the White House for the EPA 2 years prior. It is too bad one party has co-opted environmental stewardship from the party that had the lasting policies. We know who the OG’s were though.
Oh sure, Reagan was a great environmentalist.
In 1966, just a few years after Rachel Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring was released, Reagan was campaigning in Northern California at a time when environmentalists were battling farmers over dams. While standing next to one particular river, Reagan was asked, “What’s your opinion of the Eel River?” Reagan replied by asking where it was. Turned out he was standing next to it. That was our Ronnie.
He later famously said, when asked about the preservation of the Redwood trees, “I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?”
Weird John, the CCC was formed by citizen intiative not Ronnie, but this is a good article on Ronnie
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/poli…
And Tricky Dick?
Maybe the rivers on fire and people outrage of DDT and the like spured the guy?
The president’s basic apathy about the environment produced a split personality in administrative policy.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillatio….
“At the close of the 1960s, the United States could not escape the fact of, as TIME put it in 1968, “the relentless degradations of a once virgin continent.” The evidence was right in front of citizens’ faces. Pollution had gotten bad enough to be undeniable, and science had become advanced enough to make the reasons why clear. In 1963, smog had killed 400 New Yorkers, and Lake Erie’s oxygen content had become so depleted that the center of the lake sustained precious little life. An oil spill off the California coast in 1969 coated 400 square miles with slime and killed hundreds of birds. Scientists announced that auto exhaust was at high enough levels in some places that it could cause birth defects. The city of St. Louis smelled, as one resident put it, “like an old-fashioned drugstore on fire.”
The science of ecology — which still had to be defined for TIME’s readers — was expanding and attracting new thinkers, who showed that the U.S. bore more than its fair share of the environmental degradation that had swept the world in the previous decades. (The country had 5.7% of global population in 1970, by TIME’s count back then, but consumed 40% of the natural resources.) The reasons for such heavy consumption went beyond mere economic ability to consume, some theorized. The U.S. had been built, after all, on the idea that it was a vast land there for the taking. Those national myths began to fall apart on a broad scale in the 1960s and ’70s, as the American Indian Movement and the environmental movement, respectively, reminded people that in fact that land was already being used and its resources were finite.”
https://time.com/4696104/environmental-pro…
Next up in revisionist history from Jon and Michael, “How Southern Democrats were key to the Civil Rights Movement”.
Y’all are missing the point, trying too hard to score points.
Nope John it was all the CONServatives who brought US Civil Rights correct? LMAOROG
Hint it was the Southerners (both D & R) who opposed Civil Rights, you know those RED STATES? Unless you want to “believe” there were a bunch of “liberals” running the South back then?