After months of sad farewells, the owners of the remaining 20 or so permanent trailers at Lawson’s Landing are poised to meet a July 13 deadline to vacate the Dillon Beach campground after a nearly five-decade tenure.
As their tenants clear out, the campground’s owners are contending with delays in studies from a scientific review panel hired by Lawson’s Landing that would help bring the business into compliance with the California Coastal Commission. In 2011, the commission ordered the removal of over 200 trailers to make way for a series of dune restoration projects and a switch to short-term visitor stays.
“I want to show that we’re being 100-percent proactive and doing everything as much as possible on our end to be compliant,” said Mike Lawson, whose family has owned a 960-acre property that contains Lawson’s Landing and vast stretches of dunes since the 1920s. “The problem is they’re not moving quickly enough…for us to generate the revenue we need.”
Set exactly five years after the commission’s 2011 order, the July deadline for the evacuation of permanent trailers could mean heavy financial losses for Lawson’s Landing without a replacement campsite to recoup lost trailer rents, which reeled in $400 or $500 monthly for each of the roughly 230 trailers.
Per the commission’s order, the campground must make the spots where permanent trailers formerly stood available to visitors for RV parking or camping for no more than 14 consecutive days—a change in keeping with the commission’s mission to ensure public access to the coast.
But how that change will happen depends on several crucial studies that would complete plans required under the campground’s Coastal Development Permit. Delays in the completion of those studies, Mr. Lawson said, have prevented Lawson’s Landing from moving forward with broad overhauls of the grounds, including the construction of a new wastewater treatment system and new short-stay camping and RV and cottage sites.
Lawson’s Landing voluntarily agreed to the participation of a scientific panel at the urging of the commission, which in 2012 deemed plans drafted by a campground consultant to be inadequate. Tasked with shoring up those inadequacies, the six-member panel—which has dropped to five since its formation in 2013—is composed of environmental specialists focused on gathering data and analyzing it so that habitat restoration plans can be drafted. The panel’s conclusions will inform how Lawson’s Landing should shape stormwater, drainage, landscaping, traffic, camp management and employee housing plans, among others.
“Everything hinges on waiting to hear what the review panel has to say so that we can design accordingly,” Mr. Lawson said. “We were getting a lot of praise from everyone for choosing to use a scientific review panel , but it’s obvious that we had great concerns about the delay from the beginning.”
Now, according to Mr. Lawson, the campground can either keep waiting for the studies while losing tens of thousands of dollars monthly or start renting to short-term campers—before the commission green-lights the change. It’s a risk the owners appear willing to take.
“If I’m going to get in trouble, then I’m willing to do it because [the commission] says I have to do it anyway,” said co-owner Willy Vogler, referring to the commission’s mandate to provide short-term rentals. “And if it pays for the bills, by God, that’s good too.”
According to panel members contacted by the Light, the delay stems from a combination of the commission’s slow approval process, personal hindrances, a clash of opinion among members and a pending deal to sell 465 acres as a conservation easement to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service—a multimillion-dollar deal that would also shore up Lawson’s Landing’s finances during the transition period. The federal agency declined to comment on when a deal might be reached.
Panel member Francesca Demgen, a hydrologist and president of the Friends of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, said the studies could be completed over the next couple of months.
“Everybody wants to get this done,” said Ms. Demgen, whose work with the panel slowed after her husband died in 2014. “I want to get this done so that it meets the Coastal Commission’s needs and meets the Lawson’s needs so they can move forward with their business.” Ms. Degman’s work has focused on collecting baseline hydrology data and determining how to remove a road cutting through pastureland without creating a drainage ditch.
A spokeswoman for the commission, Nancy Cave, said that the death of Ms. Demgen’s husband marked the only delay that the commission knew of, and said the campground has been in control of both the panel’s meeting schedule and the approval of its members.
According to Tom Flynn, an environmental manager and Lawson’s Landing’s representative on the panel, three of the panel members were recommended by the Environmental Action Committee, a vocal opponent of the permanent trailers at odds with Lawson’s Landing for many years over dune degradation and an old sand quarry. In 2011, commission staff initially proposed allowing the trailers to stay with short-term occupancy limits, but commissioners scrapped that idea by adopting a proposal by E.A.C. to remove the trailers. Mr. Flynn said the owners accepted the recommendations “in a spirit of cooperation and good faith with E.A.C.”
In recent months, Lawson’s Landing has met tough roadblocks from the commission, including a denial in April of a proposed wastewater system that commission staff said would disrupt sensitive habitat. Lawson’s contested that claim, stating that the state Regional Water Quality Control Board signed off on the proposed system and that its location closer to the entrance would have placed it above a thick layer of topsoil for filtration. The system would provide septic hook-ups for new RV sites and 20 new cottages.
The wastewater system would also replace an old system used by six employees living in trailers on the campground and, per the coastal permit, allow them to remain at Lawson’s Landing. With the old system slated for abandonment next month and employees facing eviction without a wastewater alternative, Lawson’s owners have asked the commission’s acting executive director, Jack Ainsworth, to meet and discuss granting an extension to keep the employee trailers after July 13.
Mr. Lawson said he has not yet heard back, while Ms. Cave said the commission has not received an extension request.
Meanwhile, as July 13 nears, piles of scrap metal and wood cluster on flat tracts of sand where hundreds of trailers stood, some of them for over four decades. Some of the more valuable Spartan-model antique trailers have gone to collectors. One Spartan was sent to the Port of Oakland and set on a shipping container bound for Taiwan, where it will become a bar.
Along with the trailers, the tenants—some of whom, like the trailers, have lived at Lawson’s Landing for decades—have begun leaving. Many plan to return once the short-term sites open, but for them, quick jaunts to the coast could never measure up to what the permanent-trailer community has described as California’s last legitimate place where people can be truly exposed to the ocean.
“It’s night and day,” said Gene Perry, who with his wife, Tami, owned a trailer at Lawson’s for seven years. “You can be camping over there, but it’s a free-for-all. This really is the death of a community.”