“The California Coastal Commission can now fine property owners who illegally block public access to beaches, putting new teeth into a 38-year-old environmental law, under a budget trailer bill that Gov. Jerry Brown signed Friday.

“The commission’s new power could affect landowners all up and down California’s coast … .

“Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, had carried a bill last year to empower the commission, but it fell a few votes short of passage when some fellow Democrats got cold feet at the last minute. She finally succeeded Friday by slipping the bill through as part of the $108 billion state budget package.”

As is always the case on these issues, the PLF provided crucial context:

“Damien Schiff, a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said landowners will now bear the burden of suing the commission if they feel a fine is improper.

“‘A lot of property owners would say the potential downside risk — the value of the penalties and the costs of litigating — could be so high that, even if that property owner was 100 percent certain that he’s right on the law, it wouldn’t be worth it to him,’ Schiff said, calling the new law ‘a significant game-changer.’ …

“Atkins called those fears ‘as of yet unfounded, and unreasonable. … I don’t think the Coastal Commission will overreach.'”

Who cares what happened in 2006? This is 2014!

This is a classic example of what people mean when they say term limits wipes out institutional memory. Anyone who’s been following state politics for more than the six years Atkins has been in the Assembly knows “overreach” is what the Coastal Commission does.

The agency was founded by a guy who literally didn’t believe in private property rights and who enjoyed mystical babbling about the needs of Gaia — an enviro religion dressed up with scientific terminology. Peter Douglas’ radicalism has animated the agency ever since. I wrote about the sort of governance that results from this mind-set in a 2006 Union-Tribune editorial:

“Consider the case of San Luis Obispo engineer Dennis Schneider, who hoped to build his dream home on a cliff above the ocean in a remote area north of Cayucos. Incredibly by normal cognitive standards, typically by Coastal Commission standards, the agency blocked his plans on the grounds that the home would be such an aesthetic affront to passing kayakers, boaters and surfers that it would violate their rights. We are not making this up.” 

Douglas resigned as Coastal Commission executive director in 2011 and died a year later, so the upper reaches of the agency remain jammed with holdovers from his long reign. We can expect these zealous bureaucrats to go overboard with their new powers.

It’s what Peter wants. It’s what Gaia (sigh-a) needs.

But it you wanted to pick the one state agency that most consistently advocates a radical view of government power, you’ll never top the California Coastal Commission. It was founded and run for a quarter-century by a green zealot named Peter Douglas — a guy who really and truly didn’t believe in private property rights and who pushed the commission to ridiculous extremes. I wrote about one of his crusades in an editorial in 2006:

“Consider the case of San Luis Obispo engineer Dennis Schneider, who hoped to build his dream home on a cliff above the ocean in a remote area north of Cayucos. Incredibly by normal cognitive standards, typically by Coastal Commission standards, the agency blocked his plans on the grounds that the home would be such an aesthetic affront to passing kayakers, boaters and surfers that it would violate their rights. We are not making this up.”

But the courts backed Schneider up, thankfully. So there was a way to deal with Douglas’ assault on conventional notions about property, individuals and government control of property and individuals.

Not just power to assess fines, but limited checks and balances

Now, the San Diego Democrat chosen to be the next speaker of the Assembly wants the commission to be given more powers with fewer checks and balances. CalWatchdog alum Steve Greenhut talks about Toni Atkins’ scary legislation in his latest U-T San Diego column.

“Last year, the Atkins bill (AB 976) was controversial enough even among some environmentally minded Democrats that it was rejected in the Assembly. But as Atkins ascends to the Assembly speakership, it’s likely that this legislative priority will rise again.

“Is it needed? The vast majority of the commission’s complaints against homeowners already are resolved before going to court. If the commission still meets resistance, it petitions the state attorney general for legal action.

“If the Atkins bill passes, the commission can decide on its own to begin assessing daily fines. The property owners can attend a public hearing before commissioners, but it’s not a neutral proceeding with witnesses and due process. The burden of proof would shift from the agency to the individual property owner.

“Not many owners could risk the bank account by challenging the agency. Some critics say the bill would provide an incentive for the commission to target picayune issues because the more fines it imposes, the more money that fills up an environmental-restoration fund.”

Groan. This is not what California needs — further empowering the Peter Douglas disciples who still run the Coastal Commission two years after his death and who still think Douglas’ views about property rights are what matters — not that minor clause in federal law known as the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“The CEOs who have long ranked California as the least-business-friendly state do so more over excessive regulations than high taxes.

“This regulatory zealotry takes many shapes, afflicting both unlucky individuals and California in general.

“The staff of the Coastal Commission, created by state voters in 1972, doesn’t just throw its weight around by blocking development well inland. It often reflects the contempt for constitutional property rights displayed by Peter Douglas, the self-described “radical pagan heretic” who was the agency’s executive director from 1985 to 2010. …

“But it is the recklessness of the California Air Resources Board that has been most consequential. Instead of using cost-benefit analyses to gauge the impact and appropriateness of regulations, the air board now is hostile to the idea that regulations even have an economic downside. This is especially so since Mary Nichols began her second stint as executive director in 2007. … The history of AB 32, the state’s landmark anti-global warming law, couldn’t be more instructive.

“The first-in-the-nation 2006 legislation — which forces a gradual shift to cleaner-but-costlier types of energy — contains a provision allowing a governor to suspend the law in case it is hurting the California economy. This was included because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, lawmakers of both parties, economists and business interests were worried that if AB 32 didn’t inspire the rest of the world to follow California’s lead, the state would be left with uniquely high energy costs that would make it difficult to compete economically with rival states and nations.

“But when the rest of the world didn’t follow the Golden State, extremist defenders of the law rewrote history by depicting it as a job-creation measure designed to be an engine of economic growth. The air board assisted the campaign with an upbeat 2008 economic forecast of AB 32’s likely effects that was scorned as unrealistic and misleading by Harvard’s Robert Stavins, the world’s leading environmental economist. … .”

The air-board ‘scientist’ who ‘studied’ under a fugitive pedophile

The essay also gave me the chance to bring up the still-incredible story of Hien Tran, who to this day works at a high-paying job at the air board.

“In late 2008 and early 2009, the U-T editorial page documented that costly, far-reaching air board rules to sharply reduce diesel emissions were tainted by academic fraud. They had been overseen by Hien Tran, a staffer who lied about his academic background and then later offered as evidence of his qualifications a Ph.D. from a diploma mill associated with a fugitive pedophile.

“But Nichols refused to fire Tran — only suspending him without pay for two months. She knew of Tran’s deception when her agency’s governing board voted to approve Tran’s diesel rules but chose not to tell most board members about it until 11 months after they voted to approve the rules.

“Soon afterward, the concerns about a lying researcher playing a key role in crafting onerous regulations turned out to be amply justified. In April 2010, several California news organizations reported that emission rules the air board adopted in 2007 for off-road diesel vehicles were based on computer models that grossly exaggerated the emissions. Tran was a primary author of a 2006 study that encouraged the board’s 2007 regulatory decisions.

“He still wasn’t fired. He remains on the air board staff, making $91,500 annually as an air pollution specialist.”

Hien Tran, you need to understand, is doing his bosses’ bidding. That his Ph.D. was from Thornhill, aka FPU (Fugitive Pedophile University)? That’s a minor detail.

April 28, 2012

By John Seiler

California is just for rich folks now. If you’re middle class, I suggest getting out. If you’re poor, you can get EBT cards, Section 8 housing, etc., but then you’re hooked into the government system.

Some of my previous posts on this topic raised the hackles of some readers, especially when I blamed Peter Douglas, the late head of the California Coastal Commission, for much of the attack on the middle class. He and his rich, elite buddies, such as ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gov. Jerry Brown, have imposed laws and regulations that keep safe their cozy arrangements and drive up the value of their property, but make California property prohibitively expensive for the rest of us, especially for families.

The problem is that free societies are based on the middle class. All societies have elites. Even the Soviet Union, advertised as a perfectly egalitarian society for “the workers,” in fact allowed the bosses to live in luxury undreamed of by Warren Buffett. Stalin and his socialist elite comrades dined on caviar and imported wines while the masses starved to death by the millions. They lived in the palaces and the dachas of the executed Tsar, while tens of millions of Russians huddled in hideous high-rises — just the blueprint the Douglas-Brown-Schwarzenegger elite has in stock for us under SB 375. Read “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” if you want to see how Stalin ruled, and how we will be ruled.

The Elite still can afford to live here, as shown by a flyer in my morning Orange County Register for Lambert Ranch in Irvine, “From $900,000, Nine Model Homes.” (Picture above.) A home model called “The Grove at Lambert Ranch” is advertised as “Sloping upward and gazing across Irvine. Amid stands of eucalyptus trees. 4,278 — 5,182 square feet. Up to 6 bedrooms/6.5 baths.” Today is the Grand Opening.

Only the “1 percent” — and above — can afford these kinds of digs.

I don’t begrudge rich people homes like this. If they got their money honestly, which most have, then more power to them.

But this is the only type of homes now being built in coastal California.

With no middle class, there’s no free society. There’s just an elite that pushes everybody around while doing what it wants (Douglas, Arnold, Brown, etc.), a small middle class, mostly made up of government workers, and a large proletariat that’s unorganized, repressed and can’t accumulate the capital (as in free societies) to climb into the middle class or higher.

April 23, 2012

By John Seiler

A couple of weeks ago Peter Douglas died. For 25 years he was the head of the California Coastal Commission. In an article, I pointed out that he was an elitist who was obsessed with hyper-regulating California for the enjoyment of elitists like himself — all under the guise of happy-slappy environmentalism. The result was the that the middle-class effectively was banned from owning property anywhere near California’s beautiful coasts.

Many commentators responded:

“Are you that jaded that you couldn’t wait his grave is cold to speak ill of the dead?…. You deserve ZERO.”

“This is completely unprofessional. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“This is completely insensitive.”

“This is a cowardly post John. Very fitting of your character if you ask me.”

“Thank you,  John.  Guess you aren’t in the decency business either. There is just no limit to where you go and what you will say to make a political point.”

To quote Orange County native Steve Martin:

Fortunately, demographer and “Truman Democrat” Joel Kotkin has made similar points to what I did. Kotkin even voted for Gov. Jerry Brown in the 2010 election. Kotkin is an old-style liberal Democrat who is concerned about the working people of California — the old middle class that’s being driven into poverty our out of the state. He has nothing but disdain for the elitists.

Adios, Taxifornia

Here are some excerpts from a recent interview:

“as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.

“Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

“The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.”

That’s the point I made in my article on Douglas. In particular, Douglas’ CCC (whose initials are a lot like CCCP) made coastal development almost impossible. In Huntington Beach, some local developers spent 35 years trying to put up housing projects. At first, they wanted to put up regular middle-class neighborhoods that most folks could afford. (A similar development was put up there a few years earlier in 1970, with houses selling for $20,000.)

The CCC nixed that.

The developers came back with a proposal for housing that was less dense — and more expensive.

The CCC nixed that too.

On it went. Until about three years ago, when the CCC finally approved the development. Here it is: The Bungalows at Pacific Shores gated community. I drove over there and looked around. The sales lady said the cost for the home I checked was $1.2 million. Times are tough, so you probably could steal it for $1.1 million.

The Website enthuses:

“Imagine waking up every day at the beach. That’s the essence of the Pacific Shores lifestyle. Surfing, swimming and sunbathing on the sand are all just a short three-block walk from the community. And all of the other attractions that have made Huntington Beach famous – the world-renowned pier and the shops, restaurants and nightlife along Main Street – are only minutes away. At Pacific Shores, you’ll be surrounded by the unique coastal culture that has earned Huntington Beach renown as Surf City USA.”

That’s a lifestyle once enjoyed by California’s middle class. Now, thanks to the late Douglas limiting the coast to himself and his rich, elitist friends, the coast can be enjoyed only by the “1 percent” — or maybe the “0.1 percent.”

Notice in the picture how one of the housing styles is called “Plantation.” That’s appropriate. The Elite, whose fortunes the late Douglas promoted, lives on a plantation — and you’re the taxpayer-slave who lives in a shack.

Back to Bakersfield

Sure, you still can live in Bakersfield and drive a couple of hours to the beach, and buy a year-round state parks pass for $195. But the pass price and the high cost of gas, averaging $4.17 a gallon today in California, is going to make that really expensive. Better take a bath and put Merle on the iPod:

Let’s get back to the Kotkin interview:

“‘Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.

“While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax.”

Then there’s AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. It was signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give him a legacy, which he’s now exploiting on his globetrotting for extreme environmentalism. It was supposed to encourage other states and countries to follow suit by killing their industries for absurd reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But nobody is following California into economic folly.

The main result is that AB 32 will kill 1 million jobs.  It doesn’t matter to Arnold, who is worth $700 million, a fact that came out last year when his wife filed for divorce after it was revealed that Arnold was promoting global warming with the family maid. (Or half that, if Maria goes through with the divorce.)

Since he signed AB 32 in 2006, even the term “global warming” has been frozen out by environmentalist fanatics, who now use the term “climate change” — a nebulous phrase that could mean anything, and does.

Arnold also signed into law the lesser known SB 375, whose aim is to jam poor and middle-class Californians, ant-like, into high-rises, while Arnold and the others in the mega-millions Elite frolick in the depopulated coastal areas.

The ‘new regime’

Kotkin interview:

“And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their “smart growth” plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. “What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.

“‘The new regime’—his name for progressive apparatchiks who run California’s government—’wants to destroy the essential reason why people move to California in order to protect their own lifestyles.'”

“Housing is merely one front of what he calls the ‘progressive war on the middle class.’ Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost of energy and drive out manufacturing jobs without making even a dent in global carbon emissions. Then there are the renewable portfolio standards, which mandate that a third of the state’s energy come from renewable sources like wind and the sun by 2020. California’s electricity prices are already 50% higher than the national average.”

So, is there a solution for the survival of the California middle class?

Yes. Click here.

By Katy Grimes

In the California Assembly and Senate Monday, one would have thought that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just died and was being eulogized. But the ghost of FDR was not present. Instead, Peter Douglas of the notorious California Coastal Commission, who passed away last week, was on the menu of latest favorite legislative adjournment in memory devotionals.

Based on the unusually lengthy and numerous speeches, Democratic lawmakers apparently think Douglas was a king or a saint.

“The coast is never saved, it’s always in the process of being saved,” lawmakers from  the Senate and Assembly said in both houses today, using an oft-repeated quote by Douglas from a 2001 Los Angeles Times story in their eulogies.

“Saved from what… blocked views?” a Capitol friend asked me.

Douglas is “the person who did the most to wreck California the past 25 years,” my colleague John Seiler recently wrote.

No friend of homeowners in coastal regions, Douglas was responsible for decades of Coastal Commission abuse of homeowners through denials of any kind of development — except for those with mega-bucks. I have watched for years as the California Coastal Commission has obstructed and practiced the worst forms of state-activism-with-a-badge against middle and working class homeowners.

Homeowners who just happened to purchase lower-priced homes within miles of the coast have been subjected to horrible property rights abuse by the commission, and been denied basic bathroom and kitchen updates, outdoor painting, deck additions, garage rebuilds and landscaping re-do’s. The commission is notorious for being drunk with power, and bestowing privileges only on celebrities and the very wealthy.

“After 25 years assaulting basic property rights and the U.S. and California constitutions as the head of the Stalinesque California Coastal Commission, he finally gave up his tyrannical ghost,” Seiler wrote.

And since Douglas was a property owner in the state’s beautiful high-rent area of Marin County, and on the Smith River in Del Norte County, it’s not difficult imagining his personal interest in locking the door behind him.

“Along the coast now, matters are getting even worse,” Seiler wrote. “Extreme Coastal Commission regulations halt any normal suburban developments, allowing only McMansions worth at least $1.2 million a house. Basically, elitists like Douglas want the riff-raff kept away from their precious coast, so they can enjoy it for themselves.”

Ironically, Douglas graduated in 1960 from the exclusive Robert Louis Stevenson prep school in Pebble Beach, where he attended  8th grade through 12th–a value today worth more than $250,000 in tuition. RLS is an exclusive boarding school for children as young as pre-kindergarten, through high school graduation.

In 2005, Douglas received an award from “RLS,” as it is commonly known on the Monterey Coast, and to California elites. “On Saturday night of Reunion Weekend the Alumni Association recognized three alumni. Peter Douglas ’60, an attorney and Executive Director of the California Coastal Commission received the Merle Greene Robertson Award for Service to Society,” RLS published in 2005.

Republicans followed the Thumper rule Monday on manners: “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say nothing at all.”

I prefer Gertrude Stein’s version: “If you can’t say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”

And sit by me they did.

I can’t repeat what others said about Monday’s legislative swooning and fawning over one of the worst anti-property rights abusers in the history of the state. But I will say that state  Capitol employees from both sides of the aisle at the Capitol weren’t happy about the embarrassing and unprofessional pander.

Watch it for yourself: California Channel April 9, 2012.

Staff of the California Coastal Commission (CCC) had sought to limit the time residents of Lawson’s Landing, a beach resort in Marin County, could stay in their own trailer homes, which they would be forced to rent when not occupied. That scheme did not sit well with the trailer owners, who were “beyond furious” according to one attendee at the CCC’s Wednesday meeting in San Rafael, and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the group’s name, “Save Lawson’s Landing.” Now the Commission is imposing a different plan.

The CCC has ordered some 200 of the trailer homes to get off the property entirely. It gives the owners until 2017 to vacate, after which the spaces will be reserved for recreational vehicles. Lawson’s Landing will secure a formal permit but will suffer financially from loss of the trailer homes and other restrictions. A coastal property owner present at the meeting told CalWatchDog.com that “repeatedly the CCC staff said that they were not interested in the economics of the Lawsons’ business. They didn’t care if they shut them down.  Basically, not their problem was the take-home message.”

The California Coastal Commission is an unelected body dating from 1972 that manages to combine Stalinist regulation with Mafia-style corruption. During the 1990s, Coastal Commissioner Mark Nathanson served prison time for a bribery conviction. Peter Douglas, an anti-property-rights zealot, has run the Commission since 1985. At a recent Sacramento conference, Douglas and CCC supporters appealed for more money, more staff and more power, including the ability to bypass the courts and impose fines directly.

July 19, 2011