Court overturns California rule protecting coast

A Sacramento-based appellate court on Tuesday invalidated a regulation that is one of the state's main tools in guarding the California coast.

The State Lands Commission regulation bars development on publicly owned tidelands, which are on the water side of an ever-shifting line established by a commission formula.

But a three-justice panel of the 3rd District Court of Appeal ruled that the regulation is not valid because it has never been vetted under the terms of the Administrative Procedure Act. It is what is referred to as "an underground regulation," the justices said in a 14-page opinion.

Among other things, the act requires public notice and a chance for public comment before a regulation takes effect.

The California Office of Administrative Law, charged with ensuring all agency regulations are clear, necessary, legally valid, and available to the public, held that this regulation is exempt from the requirements of the act because it is "the only legally tenable interpretation of a provision of law."

But the appellate panel reversed Connelly, saying the regulation "is potentially both overinclusive, prohibiting development on land that does not now and may never ... belong to the state, and underinclusive, failing to prohibit development on land that may become state land. ... Therefore, (it) is not the only legally tenable interpretation of law because it departs from and embellishes upon constitutional, statutory, and decisional law."

Building along the California Coast has always been a pay to play game. Salt Creek was once a state beach with a few homes at the top where the Ritz Carlton now stands, but the hotel company greased a lot of hands from the bottom of the process on up and VOILA, a new beach front hotel was constructed.

A Sacramento-based appellate court on Tuesday invalidated a regulation that is one of the state's main tools in guarding the California coast.

The coast needed protection like I need a third eye.

This abuse of law began in the 60s, when the nutjob brigade discovered the word "environment," and began a continuing chain of illegal "abuses and usurpations." For noble causes, of course.

Having been in the middle of that evolution, I experienced first hand the rise of mini-tyrants like Barbara Boxer.

Recall, if you know history, or simply imagine the State of California owning thousands of acres of tidelands, and the legislature (sound familiar?) deciding to make some bucks (to spend as they saw fit, of course,) out of otherwise useless lands, With no restrictions whatsoever attached.

In what would otherwise be prosecuted as fraud, a later legislature imposed simple restriction on the new owners, generations after the fact. No real use of the property was allowed.

And politicians wonder why they are held in such low regard.

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