At a public workshop on Tuesday, county staff described the remaining roadblocks to the long-anticipated update to the Local Coastal Program, generating general frustration among county supervisors and numerous West Marin farmers who spoke.
The Board of Supervisors has until May to accept or reject the language of a majority of its amendments to the 1982 coastal program, a planning document that identifies the ground rules for development in the coastal zone. The update must be approved by the California Coastal Commission, which has tossed proposals back and forth with the county for years.
Though the deadline for approval is fast-approaching, county staff are still hung up on changes the coastal commission made last November. The workshop on Tuesday was meant to prepare the board and the public for a board vote on April 24, when the supervisors must either approve the language for five of the seven updated amendments or else reject them and force the county to resubmit them to the commission all over again.
Staff highlighted problems ranging from clerical errors to serious policy shifts around agriculture, community zoning, building requirements related to sea-level rise and more.
Taking a step back after the presentation, Supervisor Kathrin Sears expressed concern that the staff was lost in the details and was not communicating the stakes of the issues in an accessible way.
“We need to know which issues to zero in on here, which have the most impact and what exactly is at stake—we need to know what, if anything, we want to die on the hill for,” she said. She encouraged staff to give a more accessible presentation in April.
Other supervisors echoed her concern that the devil was lost in the details.
Marin’s L.C.P. is divided into seven amendments across two sections, the Land Use and Implementation Plans, but the county presenters, senior planners Jack Liebster and Tom Lai, focused on the three amendments that relate to the Implementation Plan. (The two amendments related to land use were approved last May by supervisors and action on the remaining two, which relate to environmental hazards, has been delayed until an unspecified time.)
The regulations concerning agriculture have been a contentious point for years. In an effort to support longstanding operations, the county initially proposed that “ongoing agriculture” operations be exempt from coastal permit requirements that kick in for operations that want to change production activities.
But the coastal commission slipped in language that confuses the definition of ongoing agriculture, adding that such operations must also be “legally established.” County planner Jack Liebster said on Tuesday that that language implies that agricultural producers that have changed crops since the 1982 L.C.P. may not be legal because they were not required to obtain a coastal permit at the time.
There is also debate around what constitutes a change in agricultural production for ongoing operations. The commission had disagreed with the county-proposed criteria that defined it as any intensification of land and water use.
Mr. Lai fleshed out the issue after the hearing. “It was our thinking that producers would only need a coastal permit when they made a change that affected coastal resources,” he said. “Therefore, even for longstanding operations, we would be able to look at environmental impacts if they go into wetlands or start terracing for vineyards, but not for a change such as converting grazing areas to row crops, for example.”
Without this specificity, Mr. Lai said there could be uncertainty and disagreement about compliance with the county’s permit exemptions.
Farmers from West Marin who spoke at the meeting, including Albert Straus of Marshall, Peter Martinelli of Bolinas and Point Reyes beef rancher Kevin Lunny, all stressed the importance of not allowing the permitting process to become too onerous for existing or new farmers.
Mr. Martinelli, who said he was at the first planning meeting for the L.C.P. in 2009, expressed frustration that the coastal commission and the county had been back and forth on the language so many times, often with “one step forward and four back.”
Addressing Supervisor Sear’s earlier comment, he said, “I think it’s important the county is willing to die on the hill and invest in this process further until this is worked out. We have to be very careful not to tie the hands of future agriculturists.”
Mr. Lai agreed that if they did not change the language, there was a risk of “choking out” farmers in the coastal zone. He lay some blame on the coastal commission, and said it might be reflective of a larger trend in their management of agriculture on the state’s coast.
Remaining sticking points for the county regarding the implementation amendments include uncertainty around the status of structures and lots that predate the Coastal Act, the categorization of piers as shoreline protective devices and whether the commission’s proposed regulation of private wells exceeds the purpose of the Coastal Act.
Mr. Lai clarified that, in order to address these issues, supervisors could reject the entire set of amendments with the intention of re-submitting them in the future, though that could mean lengthy delays, as the commission has indicated it had other plans to work on.
The other option is to accept the amendments with the intention of re-submitting modifications to be hammered out with the commission.
“The risk of that option is that once we accept the current language, we can’t guarantee that the commission will agree with us and change it,” Mr. Lai said.
Though the board’s acceptance would mean that five out of the seven amendments necessary to complete the update were completed, the new L.C.P. will not be implemented until the remaining two amendments that pertain to environmental hazards are also completed. County planners said on Tuesday that there is no definite timeline for those chapters yet.
The Board of Supervisors will conduct the hearing on the amendments at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 24 in the supervisors chambers at the Marin County Civic Center.