Several times over the past many years, I’ve ended a column about California’s greatest natural asset with the same words:
The coast is never saved, it’s always being saved.
Today I’m beginning with that thought.
The words are not mine. The late Peter Douglas, former executive director of the California Coastal Commission, uttered them many years ago. He was pointing out that it would take constant vigilance to fend off repeated attempts to chip away at the protections he helped enshrine in the Coastal Act.
Over the last few days, the person doing the chipping was Gov. Gavin Newsom, who pushed a bill that would have shredded a page of the Coastal Actin a way that would have benefited a longtime campaign donor.
Odious, yes, but if you’re thinking of running for president one day, why not go for broke?
Coastal protection advocates held their breath late into the night Friday as the clock ticked at the end of the legislative session. But before I let you know how it played out, I’m going to back up a bit.
I’d just returned last week from a trip back east, where I’d taken photos of signs blocking my access to some beaches in Connecticut and New York. A typical under-handed tactic they use is to prohibit parking in beach lots unless you show proof of residence.
If you’re not a resident, goodbye. The parking lot could be nearly empty and they’ll send you away, and then you’ll discover there is nowhere else to park within easy or safe walking distance. It’s a surefire way to essentially privatize beaches.
So I came home eager to remind everyone that we have something special in California, and that we should all be lighting candles on the cake celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Coastal Act.
That’s the framework that established guidelines regarding public access, conservation and development. And it came about because more than half a century ago, when it appeared that the coast was becoming too privatized and industrialized, a citizen uprising led to the protections we enjoy today.
Now back to Gov. Newsom.
I’d barely unpacked my vacation bags when a gaggle of sources and news reports grabbed my attention, and the Calmatters story and headline neatly summed things up:
“Newsom pushes environmental carve-out for campaign donor’s Santa Monica project.”
The project, Calmatters reported, “belongs to Jeff Worthe, who, along with his wife, Kristin Worthe, has donated more than $274,000 to Newsom’s campaigns and inaugural fund between 2018 and 2022, according to state campaign finance records.”
Susan Jordan, of the California Coastal Protection Network, was aghast.
“You don’t expect to have a governor do something so under-handed as this, and now that it’s out in the open, there’s no shame about it,” she told me. ”And he would be the first person to carve out an exemption in the Coastal Act, that has survived all these other attacks over the last 50 years.”
Nice timing, Mr. Governor. I’d just written last month about how President Trump has launched his own attempt to torpedo the Coastal Commission and California’s long-established authority on matters of coastal conservation and development.
You’d like to see the California governor stand tall rather than come off like Trump’s caddy, kicking sand in the faces of those who have taken up stewardship of the coast.
Look, not everyone loves the Coastal Act or the Coastal Commission, which is seen by many as obstructionist and slow-footed. Sometimes, finding the right balance between sensible development and coastal conservation can be complicated.
But in essence, California is about the idea that the coast is not owned by anyone, it’s owned by everyone.
In the case of the Santa Monica project, Jordan asked the right question.
“Why the exemption?”
Is there something so odious about a reworked design that the only way to hustle it across the finish line is to give it a free pass?
“If you want to build in the coastal zone, you need to go through the Coastal Act,” Jordan told me. “That’s why we have the Coastal Act, and I don’t think it should be corrupted by this developer or by the governor.”
Newsom, when asked recently by a reporter to explain what he was up to, had this to say:
“I’m not going to comment about any pending bills.”
Why not? If you’re going to tear up the rule book on coastal development, doesn’t the public deserve an explanation, even if you’ve already got one foot out the door?
The Worthe project would sit just up from the beach in Santa Monica, and, in previous incarnations, it has included a luxury hotel, apartments and a Frank Gehry museum. The Coastal Commission signed off on it a few years ago after extended tussles and finally an agreement regarding low-cost housing provisions. After getting the green light, Worthe pulled back, and his permit expired.
But then Newsom came to the rescue with a trailer bill that aides were still pushing as of Thursday, sources tell me. It would have allowed for an unnamed project in that same location to be put forward again, this time without normal regulatory review in the event that Santa Monica failed to complete its own local coastal plan (LCP) by 2028
And since it could be difficult to meet that deadline, Newsom’s bill essentially provided a way to escape the kind of critical review demanded by the Coastal Act.
In anticipation of a Friday meeting between Newsom and the leaders of the Senate and Assembly, Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Santa Monica) rallied legislators to implore the governor to back off.
Zbur, who had been working on his own coastal development and public access bill and helping assemble Santa Monica’s LCP, was one of a dozen legislators who signed a salty missive that was sent Friday to Newsom, Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limon and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas.
“We are frustrated that, once again, we must devote time and energy to working to defeat this harmful proposal that creates unprecedented exemptions from the Coastal Act,” the letter said.
It must have made an impact. Late Friday night, when the last whistle blew at the sausage factory, the Newsom exemption had been pulled back.
Victory for the coast.
Zbur told me Saturday morning that it was not clear how the matter had played out when the governor met with the two legislative leaders Friday, but Zbur was grateful to all three of them for letting the matter drop.
“This wasn’t about the project,” Zbur said. “It was about the precedent that would have been set on having people come in and exempting a certain project from the Coastal Act. It would have been a terrible precedent.”
Despite this threat and the recent big-footing by Trump, there’s a silver lining in all of this.
“As long as there are people who want to monetize the coast for their own benefit, you’re going to need people to rise up and say no,” said Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and founder of Earth Advocacy.
And people did rise up.
Last week, dozens of organizations signed a letter to the governor opposing any “last-minute legislation to create dangerous exemptions to the Coastal Act.” Among them were Heal the Bay, Amigos de Bolsa Chica, L.A. Waterkeeper, Azul, the Surfrider Foundation and Orange County Coastkeeper.
I can think of several ways to end this column, but at the risk of repeating myself, I don’t think I can do better than to lean on this reminder:
The coast is never saved, it’s always being saved.
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