The county has tried for years to reach an agreement with the California Coastal Commission that would ease rules restricting what homeowners can do to protect their homes from encroaching seas and other environmental hazards. On Monday, planners gave up.
Instead of continuing the protracted negotiations, county staff will now address the issue when they respond to a new state law requiring municipalities to adopt plans for coping with climate change.
Marin’s standoff with the commission involves updates to the county’s Local Coastal Program, which lays out the rules for development in the coastal zone. In 2018, the commission approved the county’s updates to every chapter of the L.C.P. except the one involving environmental hazards.
The L.C.P. was adopted in 1982, long before concerns about climate change had become paramount. The hazards update was supposed to put sea-level rise front and center, while also addressing risks such as wildfire. But coastal commission staff kept sending it back with a sea of edits, and the update remained incomplete.
Late last year, after gathering extensive public input, the county took another crack at the hazards section and sent it to commission staff—only to be rebuffed again. The proposal would have allowed most homeowners of waterfront homes to raise them by up to five feet and to reinforce or reconstruct retaining walls.
Yet the coastal commission, charged with protecting coastal resources, has a policy against “armoring” shoreline properties with retaining walls, rocks or other revetments. It prefers nature-based approaches such as constructing sand dunes.
At Monday’s Planning Commission meeting, county staff declared that further negotiations would be futile.
“We really have tried to make things better, but I’m concerned that this could make things worse,” senior planner Jeremy Tejirian said, referring to the prospect of a renewed stalemate.
Instead, the county will now pursue updates to its climate policies as it complies with Senate Bill 272, a measure passed in 2023 that requires every coastal county in California to prepare a sea-level rise adaptation plan by 2034.
“The S.B. 272 analyses will be a multi-year effort backed by substantial financial investment in scientific and engineering studies,” Mr. Tejirian wrote in a report to the commission. “Such an effort will engage the public, a diverse array of stakeholders, and a variety of public agencies such as Caltrans and the National Park Service.”
The negotiations over coastal hazards rules have been of intense interest to homeowners in Marshall, Inverness and Stinson Beach. George Clyde, who owns a home on Tomales Bay, endorsed the county’s decision to pause further engagement with the coastal commission until the parties grapple with S.B. 272.
“I think the county wisely decided that we can’t get anything reasonable through that the community likes and that the coastal commission would accept, and we’re going to have to go through this all again in the next few years,” Mr. Clyde said. “Why don’t we just continue to live with the existing language in the environmental hazard section, which we’ve lived with for 45 years, and deal with these difficult issues in the years ahead?”
Mr. Clyde predicted the policy discussion about climate change will evolve in the coming decade in ways that strengthen the homeowner’s hand. “I think it’s going to be easier to protect our homes under legislation and regulations and policies five or 10 years from now than it is today,” he said.