Last year, state lawmakers broke from tradition by not including an exception for the California coast in a major housing law.
That deliberate omission came despite opposition from the California Coastal Commission — the voter-created state agency tasked since 1976 with scrutinizing anything that gets built, demolished, dug, divvied up, fixed, tamped down or clear cut within the California Coastal Zone. A stretch of land that grazes the entirety of California’s 840-mile coast, the zone reaches inland from high tide, 1,000 feet at its narrowest and five miles at its thickest.
“Once you start exempting classes of development from the Coastal Act,” Sarah Christie, the commission’s legislative director, warned CalMatters at the time, “there will be no shutting that barn door.”
Sure enough, a small herd of bills now trotting through the Legislature would further erode the commission’s long-guarded authority in the interest of spurring more housing on some of California’s most exclusive, valuable and tightly regulated real estate.
The bills — all by Democrats — take different tacks:
Together they show that many pro-housing legislators have taken heart from last year’s battle for the coast.
“The Coastal Commission and the Coastal Act have been a bit of a sacred cow and that has meant that it has been carved out of a lot of bills,” said Sen. Blakespear. Reevaluating whether that should be the case is “an area of an emerging focus from the Legislature.”
The commission is opposed to Wiener’s bill to redraw the San Francisco coastal boundary unless it’s dramatically amended. While it has yet to take formal positions on the remaining bills, it’s clear they don’t welcome this legislative trend.
“We’re troubled by the number of bills this year that seek to undermine the Coastal Act in the name of promoting housing,” said Coastal Commission Executive Director Kate Huckelbridge in a written statement. “We know from…
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