It should have been easy. Dennis and Leah Seider just needed a sign to mark their property. There are 27 miles of public beaches in Malibu, but the small stretch of sand under the Seiders’ home is not among them. The wooden house is propped up on crossbeams above the beach. A roving stranger could sit in the sand under the home and practically be in the family’s basement—unnerving, for those who live there.
In another time or place, putting up a sign could be done in a day. On the Malibu coast, under the eyes of the California Coastal Commission, it would be a four-year saga of obfuscation, litigation, and threats.
Under the Seiders’ Home
When strangers hung out too close to his home, Dennis Seider, a retired maritime attorney, would sometimes ask them to move. Some refused.
“They said, ‘Well, there’s no sign saying it’s private property, so we’re going to stay here,’” Dennis says. “It would be downright nasty.”
Leah, Dennis’s wife, is sympathetic: It is a beautiful spot. She and Dennis have lived in the house for 45 years. It’s off the highway, in an area that feels like a small-town neighborhood. They raised their kids there; they love it. “In my heart of hearts, I hate to kick anybody off,” Leah says. But it’s hard when people treat all sand as a public commons, even when it’s underneath your home.
In 2018, a helpful neighbor put up a small “Private Beach” sign on the crossbeams of the Seiders’ home. It didn’t seem controversial to Dennis and Leah: The sign was literally affixed to their house. The couple wasn’t laying claim to the coastline, just the area by the house that was theirs.
The sign stayed up for nearly two years. But March 2020 brought the COVID-19 pandemic, and California shut down access to public beaches. More people began hanging out around the Seiders’ home.
“People would come right up to our house,” Leah remembers. “And of course, we were particularly sensitized. It was COVID and we didn’t want to get sick. And we would say to people, ‘This is a private beach.’”
People were belligerent. “They would say, no, we have a right to be here.” Some people went right up to her face. “t’s like, oh, great, you’re breathing all over me,” Leah says. “So that was when it got to be more upsetting.”
It’s possible one of these people complained to authorities about the Seiders’ “Private Beach” sign—because at the end of April 2020, Dennis and Leah received a twelve-page letter from the California Coastal Commission.
“I was a believer in the Coastal Commission,” Leah says. “But they have taken their power to a ridiculous extreme.
‘An Amicable Resolution Is Preferred’
The letter, signed by a California Coastal Commission enforcement officer, began ominously. “It has come to the attention of California Coastal Commission staff that there are signs on your property that discourage public access…”
(Of course, the State was also discouraging public access to beaches at the time because of COVID. But that irony escaped the Commission.)
The Seiders’ sign was an “unpermitted development,” warned the letter—a violation of the Coastal Act, which could be fined up to $11,250 per day retroactive to the sign’s installation.
“It was, to me, a shocking amount of threat that they were able to use,” Leah says. “I’m a believer in the theory of public agencies for the public good. But this was clearly an agency that felt it had power and was using it abusively.”
The final section of the letter had a RoboCop-feel. “An Amicable Resolution Is Preferred,” the Commission declared in an underlined heading. The Seiders had two weeks to remove the sign and submit photos to the Commission of sign-free crossbeams. If the Seiders declined to remove the sign “voluntarily,” the Commission would consider formal proceedings for a cease-and-desist order and fines.
“It’s not an empty threat,” Leah says. “Which is why we immediately took the sign down. I mean, you can’t play with that kind of stuff.”
Dennis didn’t want to give up entirely. The Commission called the sign unpermitted. What if he got a permit for it? He went to the City of Malibu. But the City told Dennis that its Local Coastal Plan—drafted by the California Coastal Commission—prohibited any signs describing the boundary between public and private property on the beach.
So the Coastal Commission would fine the Seiders if they put up a sign without a permit. And the City wouldn’t give the Seiders a permit because of the Commission.
It was a Catch-22 typical of the California Coastal Commission.
‘Zealots’ on a Mission
Both Dennis and Leah supported the Coastal Act when it was passed in 1976, giving the Coastal Commission permanent power over coastline development.
“I thought the goals were admirable,” Dennis says. “To avoid overdevelopment on the coast and to preserve the coast. I thought it was a good thing.”
But over 45 years, the couple has seen the Coastal Commission push in on people’s property and use heavy fines to get their way. “We know other people that the Coastal Commission has gone after,” Leah says. “I mean, people who are retired, teachers who’ve lived in Malibu for 50 years or more. And they can’t afford it. It’s ruining their retirement and golden years.”
The problem, Dennis says, is the drafters of the Coastal Act “left enough room in the wording of the statute for zealots to slip in and feel justified and righteous in what they’re trying to do—allowing them to take property that doesn’t belong to them and give it to the public.” And, Dennis adds, “there’s probably no more implacable a foe than a zealot who feels justified in pursuing their goal.”
“I was a believer in the Coastal Commission,” Leah says. “But they have taken their power to a ridiculous extreme. And there are very few people who have had any dealings with them who still have any respect for the agency.”
Showdown in Court
Dennis spoke to Pacific Legal Foundation about filing a lawsuit. He saw his case as a First Amendment challenge: The Coastal Commission was interfering with his constitutional right to express himself. It’s hard to think of a more basic and ancient right of communication than the right to mark your space as your own.
PLF first helped Dennis and Leah file a lawsuit against the City of Malibu: Despite the Commission’s stranglehold on coastal land, the City of Malibu should have been the rightful authority to grant permission for the sign.
“This case lies at the intersection between free speech and property rights,” we argued in our complaint. “Americans should not—and do not—need government permission to mark the boundaries of their private property in order to enforce their fundamental right to exclude trespassers.”
Malibu continued to blame the Coastal Commission in court. Then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit formally brought the Commission into the dance: It said the Commission needed to be added as a defendant in the lawsuit. The Commission, of course, immediately sought to dismiss the case. The district court refused.
Dennis attended a 2023 hearing in his case. He remembers the government’s attorney telling the judge, “Your honor, they’re not allowed to put up a sign because it could mislead the public.” Public access extended 25 feet landward of the mean high tide line, and the tide changes day to day, the attorney argued.
“And the judge looked down from her bench,” Dennis recounts,
and said, ‘Counsel, are you saying that if Mr. Seider put up a sign on his house with a permit that truthfully and accurately stated where the mean high tide was on that particular day, he could not put up that sign because some indefinite time in the future it might be wrong? Because of that he’s prohibited from putting up any sign, is that what you’re saying?’ The state’s attorney had no response for that.
At that point, the judge suggested to the attorney that she “sit down with Mr. Seider and work out a settlement.”
“It was then that I knew we had won,” Dennis says.
The Family Home
When we last spoke to Dennis, he was looking out at the beach under his house and the 18-by-24-inch metal sign he was finally able to put up, marking his property. The wording on the sign was negotiated with the Coastal Commission: Public access extends 25 ft. landward of the mean high tide line; no public access allowed on the private property from there to the house.
Dennis and Leah have a full home now. Their son’s house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire. He, his wife, three kids, and dog moved in with Dennis and Leah, back in his childhood home. If there was ever a time for a family to feel secure in their house, without strangers coming right up, this is it.
The Coastal Commission modified Malibu’s Local Coastal Plan to clarify that truthful signs are allowed—but “the ambulatory nature of the boundary and the existence and nature of the applicable public rights must be clearly conveyed.”
Leah never doubted she and Dennis were legally in the right. But that didn’t give her much comfort during the nearly four years of litigation and negotiation over the sign.
“I’ve seen other people who I felt were clearly in the right with the Coastal Commission get screwed, honestly,” she says. “I’ve seen them do all sorts of abusive things.”
Dennis is grateful for Pacific Legal Foundation’s help fighting the case. “It actually turned on the right to speak about property rights,” he says. “And that’s a very important corollary to property rights. It’s what signs you can put up, what barriers you can put up, what speaking you can do to protect your property.”
