WHEN PETER DOUGLAS, longtime chair of the California Coastal Commission (CCC), died in 2012, the accolades flowed like wine. Though a state-level official, he was prestigious enough to land a New York Times obituary lauding him as a “sentry of California’s coast.” The same obit quoted a colleague who dubbed Douglas “the world’s greatest bureaucratic street fighter.”
That was intended as a compliment, but the description also suggested something less savory about Douglas’ approach: Like a street fighter, he was willing to fight dirty if he thought it was the way to win. He was a smart lawyer who grasped the nature of government power at a young age. In fact, he was the guy who wrote the law that created the CCC, which regulates construction along the California shoreline.
Douglas led the CCC for more than a quarter-century, where he imposed his will upon the commission with ruthless force and effectiveness. Douglas was informed by a deep and abiding hostility toward private property, which manifested itself in the commission’s ongoing war against property owners in California’s coastal region. His detractors saw him as arrogant, high-handed, and antagonistic but even with all that, he still got his way.
Unfortunately for Douglas, the CCC’s street-fighting tactics ran afoul of the Constitution, as the Supreme Court eventually ruled in a landmark decision defending property rights in 1987.
But that’s getting ahead of things, and this story isn’t really about Douglas, at least not directly.
This is the story of the guy who went up against the CCC in court—the guy who went up against Peter Douglas, the world’s greatest bureaucratic street fighter—and won.
ONE HOUR EACH WAY, five days a week—that’s how long Pat Nollan commuted from his family’s Ventura County beach house to his job in Los Angeles, where he worked in the city attorney’s office. That’s 70 miles each way, 10 hours per week in the car, at least.
Totally worth it, he figured. He could still be home in time to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean from his deck, which is just one hell of a view.
Pat and his wife Marilyn had leased the beach property, with its direct shoreline access and expansive ocean views, as a weekend getaway. But they loved it so much that as the lease ended, they exercised their option to buy the lot, with the idea of making it their permanent home. That required replacing the existing one-story structure on the beach lot with a slightly larger two-story house to accommodate the family.
The county permits for the rebuild weren’t hard to obtain. But because the land was in the coastal zone, rebuilding also required CCC approval. The commission was (and still is) notorious for making extreme demands on homeowners who seek to build anything even remotely near the coast. Pat Nollan knew that. What he didn’t know, when he submitted his application in February 1982 to demolish the bungalow and build the new home, was that he was starting a fight that would consume the next half-decade of his life.
The CCC granted the permit—but with a rather substantial demand attached. The commission claimed the proposed second story on the Nollans’ property created a “psychological barrier” to the ocean. The CCC demanded, as a condition of issuing the permit, that the Nollans grant an easement to the state for public access to the beach.
That meant the Nollans would be required to dedicate the entire beach area of the property for public access. It would be their gift to the State of California, so to speak—and the CCC had no intention of compensating them.
Pat didn’t like the deal—that “psychological barrier” business, in particular, sounded like a lot of vague nonsense. But the CCC had a nearly unbeaten record in court. So he accepted their terms and signed the permit agreement.
Still, the CCC’s demands stuck in his craw. And then, only after submitting the signed permit agreement, Pat came across an appellate decision detailing a case the CCC actually lost in court. So he thought: If they lost once, they could lose again.
Pat called the law firm that won that appellate case, Pacific Legal Foundation, and asked if they’d take his case. PLF attorneys were interested, but because he’d already signed the permit agreement with the CCC, there was nothing they could do. If he hadn’t signed, the attorneys explained, they could sue, but now he was out of luck.
So Pat took matters into his own hands. He went to the CCC’s office and told the secretary he messed up his permit application. She handed him the unprocessed application, he took it, walked outside, and ripped it to shreds. And remember, this is the 1980s, well before everything was computerized, so destroying that paper application meant it no longer existed. The slate was clean.
Then he called back PLF, “OK, I just ripped up my permit application. Will you take my case now?” Pat Nollan had entered the fight.
PLF AGREED TO, take Pat’s case, which went to trial, and against the odds, they came out on top. Of course, the commission couldn’t just let it rest—not Peter Douglas’ CCC. So naturally, they appealed the decision.
As an attorney, Pat knew that appeals take time; it might be months before his case made it back to court, but that was plenty of time to just go right ahead and build his new beach house anyway.
Now a lot of people might not have had the nerve to move forward like that while an appeal was pending. After all, when you’re going up against a powerful bureaucracy with a long, hostile record against property owners, you might not want to poke the bear.
But having won his case at trial, Pat knew he was within his rights. And in the meantime, he would have his new house, where he could hang around on the beach with Marilyn and the kids and watch that glorious sunset. So he had that going for him.
THE NOLLANS LOST on appeal, so they petitioned the California Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. And that, in turn, set them up to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At that point it was a pretty high-stakes game, as the Supreme Court accepts only a few dozen cases per year. There was a good chance all of Pat’s struggles could amount to zero in the end.
But once again, against the odds, the Supreme Court agreed to hear his case. Nollan v. California Coastal Commission was on.
The fundamental constitutional question for the court was this: Did the CCC’s demand that the Nollans grant an easement for public access to the beach amount to a taking of their private property? The CCC argued the answer was “no”—the state believed this requirement was simply part and parcel of the commission’s authorized powers to regulate land use along the California coast.
But PLF attorney Robert Best argued otherwise. He laid out the case that demanding a permanent easement, as a condition of the building permit, amounted to an uncompensated seizure of private property, a violation of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
That argument carried the day. After more than five years fighting his battle, Pat got his win, with the Supreme Court voting 5-4 in his and PLF’s favor. The Court ruled that the commission’s demands equated to “an out-and-out plan of extortion” and told the CCC it would either have to pay Pat for the land it wanted to take, or grant his permit without the conditions.
For the Nollans, that meant they finally could enjoy their home without having to bend to abusive and confiscatory government demands—a sweet victory after so many years of legal struggle, certainly.
But the Nollan decision’s impact went far beyond one family and one beach house; it’s tough to exaggerate how important it remains today. With the Nollan decision, the Supreme Court reasserted the importance of the Takings Clause, which states that private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation to the owner. That meant that government officials and agencies couldn’t demand that property owners surrender their constitutional rights, and gave individual citizens a powerful legal precedent to deploy in defending those rights.
WHILE THOSE WHO care about property rights cheered the decision in Nollan v. CCC, it was a substantial setback for Peter Douglas and his beloved commission. But let’s shed no tears for them. While the Nollan decision definitely slowed them down, the CCC has continued pushing property owners around. Remember that part about Douglas understanding government power, the “world’s greatest bureaucratic street fighter,” and all that? It’s still happening today.
Following the Nollan decision, Douglas embarked on a public campaign against PLF, painting a foreboding picture of how restricting his beloved commission’s high-handed ways would lead to devastation for California’s coastline. Three decades later, his dark predictions have not come to pass.
Even after Douglas passed on, his vision for the CCC has largely survived and thrived. In fact, the CCC model of demanding exactions from property owners in exchange for permits has, unfortunately, spread to other localities. And so, 33 years after the Nollan decision, PLF still regularly fields calls from property owners around the United States who face ridiculous demands from government agencies and feel like they have nowhere else to turn.
The government continues to push, but PLF keeps pushing back—and winning.
Many of those victories are thanks to the precedent set by Pat and Marilyn Nollan, who, with PLF’s legal support, took a big risk in going to the mat with Peter Douglas’ powerful CCC.
There’s a nice photo of Pat and his son Timothy around the time of his lawsuit, sitting on the porch along the edge of the beach, looking out toward the ocean. That was a long time ago, but we like to think Pat and Marilyn still enjoy sitting in that spot and smiling over that victory, looking out as the sun sets over the Pacific horizon. It still must be a hell of a view.