ASK ANY CHILD navigating the world of playground politics and they’ll tell you there are few things worse than a bully. A bully can take away your freedom and dignity to dictate their will or get you to fall in line.
Ask any homeowner what it feels like to deal with a government agency like the California Coastal Commission (CCC) and those playground days with schoolyard bullies might come back into the frame.
We bring up the CCC a lot in this issue—and for good reason: The commission has a long history of hostility toward private property owners and abusing their rights.
The CCC’s stated mission is to protect coastal resources while ensuring the public has adequate access to the coastline. But since its inception, the CCC has taken that mission to extreme lengths by using fines, regulatory takings, and bureaucratic purgatory to violate coastal homeowners’ rights. In the most extreme cases, they’ve even sought to force landowners off their own property.
The CCC has enormous power. For example, they recently fined Warren and Henny Lent more than $4 million for failing to remove a gate and outdoor stairway at their Malibu beach home. Never mind that the Lents’ gate helped prevent pedestrians from falling down a 7-foot drop to the Lents’ stairway landing. In the eyes of the CCC, defying their order just to protect people’s safety was a multi-million-dollar offense. The Lents are fighting this absurdity, but for most private homeowners, it’s easier to simply comply than fight and risk bankruptcy.
The most insidious part of the commission’s abuses is the fact that there are hardly any checks on the CCC’s power.
The CCC can issue a seven-figure penalty on its own authority, without first obtaining a court’s approval. That’s like a traffic cop giving you a ticket (a $4 million ticket) that you have to convince a judge to reject.
Coastal commissioners set their own rules, review those rules themselves, and can change their rules at any time for any reason. This warped bureaucratic nightmare is the reason PLF is currently fighting the CCC’s unchecked power.
The Constitution is designed to prevent any government body from being judge, jury, and executioner. There’s a reason the separation of powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is so important.
The CCC is not the only agency abusing its power in the name of public access and conservation. But it’s one of the worst. And because it continually twists that mission to violate people’s rights and ruin lives, homeowners must wield their constitutional rights for protection from these government bullies.