The Supreme Court turns down a Santa Barbara property owner’s attempts to block beach opening below her bluff-top estate.
By Arnold G. York/Publisher
In a victory for the California Coastal Commission, Access for All and others in favor of opening public accessways to the beach, the Supreme Court threw open the doors to the possibility of opening more than 1,200 beach accessways along the coast of California in a Monday ruling.
This may affect the current battles in Malibu over access, such as the one between music mogul David Geffen, the city and the Coastal Commission over opening an accessway through Geffen’s property in Malibu. The city and Geffen have joined together in a lawsuit against the commission.
The high court’s decision is the culmination of a battle between some beach residents, mainly in Malibu, Santa Barbara, Laguna Beach and Mendocino, and the California Coastal Commission (CCC). In exchange for building permits, the CCC, before 1987, had required beach residents to sign agreements requiring them to open beach pathways beside or in front of their houses, which would be maintained by a county, park district or a nonprofit organization. Before Monday’s ruling it was unclear whether the Supreme Court would enforce those agreements. The battle turned critical recently because these “offers to dedicate” last for 20 years and are about to expire.
Many of those accessways were obtained from private property owners who were compelled to dedicate an opening in return for the Coastal Commission granting them a permit even for additions such as a deck or sunroom. This California Coastal Commission practice of demanding a beach access dedication in return for a permit came to an abrupt halt in 1987 when the United States Supreme Court in the California case of Nollan vs. California Coastal Commission decided that the Ventura County property owner didn’t have to dedicate the access.
In uncharacteristically harsh language, the court characterized the state’s demands as an “out and out case of extortion.” The decision meant the Coastal Commission could no longer compel an offer to dedicate a public access, whether horizontal or vertical, as a condition of a permit, although many maintain the practice has continued, except now it’s called a voluntary dedication.
However, when the Supreme Court decided the Nollan case it was only prospective, which meant from that point on the Coastal Commission could no longer demand a dedication as a condition of a permit. What was left undecided was the status of all the dedications that were made before the Nollan decision, which were valid at the time they were made. But it was legally uncertain if the Nollan decision had invalidated them since the court did not specifically address that question. The issue had lain quiescent for many years, but recently the state, which has 20 years under the law to accept these accessway dedications, has made a major push to accept and open the dedications.
In some instances, the current property owners have resisted attempts to open the accessways, which had been made years before by earlier property owners, but few had the will or the resources to challenge the practice and take the case as far as it could go, which meant the United States Supreme Court.
That was the case that arose recently in Santa Barbara County where billionaire Wendy McCaw, a noted environmentalist and publisher of the Santa Barbara News Press, and a woman with a reputation for considerable resolve, went to court to block the public use of a 500-foot strip of beach below her Santa Barbara Bluffs estate. The property had been the subject of an offer to dedicate by an earlier owner of the estate. The California courts upheld the dedication but she appealed to the United States Supreme Court. After some consideration the U.S. Supreme Court decided to pass on the subject and not to overturn the existing agreements, and issued a one-line order dismissing the case.
In a prepared statement quoted in the Los Angeles Times, McCaw said she was “disappointed about the courts non-decision. My hope is that the U.S. Supreme Court will come around as it did with civil rights and stop the California Coastal Commission from expropriating private property.”
In the same L.A. Times article, Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas gave a very different point of view when he said, “This is very significant. It clearly confirms our position that if you agreed to a public access condition when it was legal to do so, you can’t get out of it now.”