The California Coastal Commission delayed a vote last week on a contentious section of the county’s proposed Local Coastal Program related to environmental hazards, deeming the issue too unresolved to vote on.
Marin County and homeowners objected to regulations they deemed too constrictive of development and property rights, such as rules for when to remove shoreline protective devices or abandon homes. Commission staff said that some deferment on dealing with sea-level rise is acceptable, but that many issues need to be dealt with now, particularly to ensure future public access to the coast.
“I think we’ve heard a lot today from homeowners in places like Stinson Beach and Seadrift and they passionately care about their houses and their interest there,” said Dan Carl, the commission’s deputy director. “But we haven’t heard from the folks who just want a day at the beach, the folks that aren’t lucky enough to live there. So part of our charge today is looking out for their interests and putting in place measures to respond to coastal squeeze.”
The commission did approve the bulk of its staff’s changes to the rest of the county’s submittal, which underwent numerous iterations over the last couple of years.
Yet commissioners adopted two new changes that the county, along with farmers and ranchers, advocated for during a lengthy public comment session at the six-hour hearing in Half Moon Bay last Wednesday.
One unanimously adopted change deleted a reference, embedded in a definition of ongoing agriculture, to “existing legally established agriculture production.” The phrase made some people balk, worrying that it could end up deeming operations illegal that have in past decades changed the type of agriculture they engaged in.
The other change, approved 9-1 after a long discussion that attempted to sort out confusion regarding current and proposed rules for agricultural permitting, eliminated a reference to the conversion of grazing to row crops as a blanket trigger for a coastal development permit.
Instead, changes to the type of agriculture will not necessitate a costly and lengthy permitting process; those permits will now be required for specific activities, such as creating a new water source or terracing.
The sections of the coastal program dealing with agriculture, biological resources, community zoning and more are now on their way to the Board of Supervisors. Yet if the board approves them, the update cannot go into effect until the hazards chapter is certified, too.
And it’s not clear when that will happen. The county hopes to revisit the hazards section soon, but commissioners said at the hearing that they also are working on many other coastal programs on the north central coast.
The hazards section has proved a sticking point between the county and coastal commission staffs—so much so that, the day before the hearing, the Board of Supervisors took an unnoticed emergency vote to authorize the head of the Community Development Agency, Brian Crawford, to pull that chapter from consideration if he thought the county would find the changes unacceptable.
In particular, the county has worried about commission staff’s definition of redevelopment, a term referring to when cumulative changes to a structure reach a point so that the structure would be considered a new building entirely. For a home that crosses that threshold, any further changes, regardless of how small, would require a coastal development permit and related studies.
Since the Coastal Act defines repairs and maintenance vaguely, in recent years commission staff came up with a specific definition for redevelopment that many in Marin found onerous: interior or exterior alterations of 50 percent or more of a major structural component, or additions and alterations leading to a 50 percent or more increase in floor area, or additions and alterations costing 50 percent or more of the market value before construction—all cumulatively tracked, dating back to 1977.
The county fears the proposed requirement would create serious disincentives to fixing up homes.
Imagine, Mr. Crawford said at the hearing, that a couple came to the county seeking an over-the-counter permit for a minor repair of their home’s subfloor to fix dry rot. County staff then discovered past work done on the subfloor—perhaps four owners ago—that put them over the 50-percent threshold. That minor repair ended up requiring a coastal permit, a hazards analysis that determined impacts for the next 100 years, and an agreement to tear down the home and restore the site when the county says it’s time to abandon the property.
“I don’t mean this in any condescending way, believe me,” he said. “But put yourself in the position of those property owners and ask yourself: would you want to go through that type of process for a very minor repair of the subfloor, or a roof, or a wall?”
Though there seemed to be some support among commission staff for nixing the 1977 start date and instead beginning the clock when the new coastal program is approved, other differences between the county and commission staffs weren’t fully resolved.
In a presentation, commission planner Shannon Fiala said the county’s hazards chapter did not comply with the Coastal Act or guidelines the commission adopted in 2015 on sea-level rise.
In particular, she said the proposal did not adequately protect public access to the coast, provide enough mitigation for development or adequately address what will happen as seas rise and private property starts to fall within the public trust.
A county proposal to streamline the process of raising homes on piers or caissons specifically drew critique, with Ms. Fiala saying it allowed raising homes without any real review, such as for visual impacts and compliance with community character.
In response, the county argued that such streamlining makes sense, given the inevitability of sea-level rise and the fact that, in many places, small lots mean there is no space to move homes farther back from the shoreline.
Supervisor Steve Kinsey, the commission’s chair, agreed, wondering what the logic was in requiring scores of homes to repeatedly request the same special permission. He said he found the implication that Marin’s proposed home-raising policy weakened the Local Coastal Program “offensive.”
“That’s not weakening. That’s making it more efficient,” he said.
Homeowners who spoke during the public comment period largely supported the county’s approach. “Quite frankly, most of us would have to abandon our homes,” Lori Kyle, president of the East Shore Planning Group, said of the commission’s version of the hazards chapter.
A few groups, like the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, supported the commission’s
approach.
Amy Trainer, the former head of the E.A.C. who now works with the California Coastal Protection Network, said the most recent studies on climate change say sea-level rise could happen even faster than previously anticipated. “Incremental change isn’t really something Mother Nature knows about,” she said.
The county has committed itself to revisiting the hazards chapter in a decade, to adjust it “as conditions change.”
The other major issue that garnered significant discussion at the hearing revolved around the definition of agriculture, particularly around how agricultural permitting is currently implemented and would be implemented.
Confusion and disagreement arose around whether coastal permits are now required for changing the type of agriculture on a piece of land, such as from grazing to row crops, if the new type was not part of an existing pattern of rotation.
Since the 1980s, a commission-approved categorical exclusion order for Marin has meant that the better part of agriculturally zoned land—but not all of it—has not needed such a permit.
Commission staff said that in the area where the exclusion order does not apply, both the current coastal program and their version required coastal development permits. But, they argued, their new version allows for streamlining processes and “de minimus waivers,” which would further ease burdens on farmers and ranchers.
The county took issue with the idea that its current coastal program requires such development permits anywhere in the coastal zone. Steve Woodside, the county’s counsel, said the commission was “implying that Marin has been a scofflaw…” “I’ll tell you [the conversion of kinds of agriculture has] been happening up and down the coast,” he said.
The language around “existing legally established agriculture production” also drew critique, with Mr. Crawford believing it could lead to challenges of crop changes made since the ’80s.
Peter Martinelli, who grows vegetables in Bolinas outside the exclusion area, didn’t think that every change on his farm had been permitted. “I think I might be in violation. I think I might need to go to jail,” he quipped.
Mr. Kinsey called the elimination of the reference “critical to our farmers and ranchers [who need to] be allowed to make decisions…based upon growing seasons and their business needs, and not to have those decisions interfered with by coastal permit applications or de minimis waivers.”