Fund Cuts Imperil Coastal Act : Against the Odds, the Lagoons Survive

Once it was a vast and fertile estuary--2,000 acres of tranquil lagoons and salt marsh that bridged land and sea and held huge populations of bird and marine life.

Today, the Ballona wetlands are nearly gone, swallowed up by the ever-expanding Los Angeles megalopolis.

The ecological destruction began in the late 1920s, when the major lagoons were drained and much of the area was reclaimed for agriculture and oil drilling. Then, two decades ago, 900 acres of the wetlands were carved up and converted into the trendy forest of high-rise condominiums, boat slips and restaurants known as Marina del Rey.

The remnants--most of which the California Coastal Commission decreed are no longer wetlands because of their degraded condition--are owned by the late Howard Hughes’ Summa Corp., which has won approval to build a $1-billion community of 20,000 residents on the site.

While some nervous environmentalists may forecast a similar fate for North County’s lagoons, state officials and most activists agree that a scenario of similar destruction is not likely to unfold here. The Coastal Act has been in place for nearly a decade, establishing a minimum standard of environmental protection, and a handful of feisty citizens groups have formed and coalesced public opinion in favor of protecting and restoring the lagoons.

Despite such favorable conditions, the lagoons’ future remains in jeopardy. Although California’s coastal management program is among the most ambitious in the world, officials with state regulatory agencies say that budget cuts have made it difficult for them to enforce the laws.

In addition, although developers complain, often with justification, about the numerous regulations and seemingly duplicative procedures that characterize building in the coastal

zone, they also frequently win exceptions to the law, state officials say. And while nonprofit organizations have emerged to rally around individual lagoons, there is no coordinated movement devoted to wetland management and restoration in San Diego County.

Finally, some of the most severe threats to lagoons are outside the coastal zone, and therefore are beyond the purview of the state regulators who look out for the wetlands.

“A lot of people thought that once the laws were on the books and the Coastal Commission was in place, the resource was saved,” said Alyse Jacobson, manager of the state Coastal Conservancy’s Resource Enhancement Program. “Well, if the law, which says very clearly that you will not fill a wetland, were strictly followed, we’d be in fine shape. The problem is, people have found all kinds of very successful ways to get around it.”

Denied the right to build on their wetland property, some developers have sued cities for inverse condemnation, claiming that the loss of development rights has reduced the value of their land.

San Diego Gas & Electric Co., for example, filed suit against the City of San Diego more than a decade ago after city officials changed the zoning of the company’s holdings at Los Penasquitos Lagoon from industrial to open space, preventing SDG&E; from constructing a nuclear power plant there. (The suit reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 and was remanded after justices ruled that the company had not exhausted local administrative remedies.)

Other developers have sought special exemptions to the Coastal Act through effective lobbying efforts in Sacramento, and local planning policies are frequently under siege by influential landowners seeking favorable amendments.

In some cases, Jacobson said, developers awarded a coastal permit to fill in an acre of wetland on the promise to restore several acres of wetland elsewhere simply fail to comply, resulting in a net loss of the habitat. Others diligently construct siltation basins to trap sediment from erosion before it is swept into the lagoons, but do not maintain the structures, which consequently become ineffective.

Silt from construction of a housing project on the hillside south of Buena Vista Lagoon’s eastern bay, for example, flows freely into the lagoon during heavy rains. At another North County subdivision site, which Coastal Commission officials declined to name, a landowner has stripped a hillside of vegetation in direct violation of his development permit. In some cases, violations like these go unnoticed until after the damage to the lagoon is done, state officials say.

“It’s not like there’s a coastal police force that can go out and check up on everything,” Jacobson said. “We’re in offices, not out there, on site, watching the progress of every development. So people get away with a lot.”

Under the Coastal Act, the Coastal Commission enforces the law along the state’s 1,100-mile coast until cities and counties adopt local coastal plans and assume the responsibility of awarding development permits and keeping an eye on their slice of the coastal zone. But that enforcement has not been an easy task.

“Enforcement has over the history of the commission been difficult and just hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves,” said Roy Gorman, the Coastal Commission’s chief counsel. “We could definitely do better if we had the staff.”

Since 1982, the commission’s staff has been cut by 47%, and it could be reduced an additional 13% under Gov. George Deukmejian’s proposed budget, according to the commission’s deputy director, Peter Douglas. The cuts have so overburdened the commission staff, Douglas said, that “it’s all our people can do to keep up with the permit load. There’s simply no time to think about much of anything else.”

During an 18-month period after the round of cuts in 1982, for example, Gorman estimated that the commission was able to tackle only one-tenth of the enforcement cases it was handling the previous year. In fact, commission staff members are occasionally alerted to violations that they simply cannot handle, Gorman said.

“It’s a matter of prioritizing the offenses,” Gorman said. “Before the cuts, we’d get a call from someone about a violation and we’d get somebody on it right away. Now, we just don’t have the staff to do that.”

Enforcement is largely accomplished through the voluntary compliance of the developer, but the Coastal Act spells out fines for those who violate the conditions of their permits. There is a penalty of up to $10,000 for any violation, such as failure to construct and maintain a siltation basin or grading during the wrong time of year. If intent to violate the law can be proven, the court can force a developer to pay an additional fine of $50 to $5,000 a day for each day the violation has existed.

The state attorney general handles these cases for the commission and the fines go into a wetland restoration fund managed by the state Coastal Conservancy.

Taking a developer to court, however, is a last resort, Gorman said, occurring only after repeated warnings or negotiations have failed to resolve the matter. About 75 such cases statewide have been filed over the last five years, and the commission reportedly is preparing legal action against three major North County violators. Gorman declined to identify them.

A more common tool used to correct violations and convince perpetrators to change their ways is the administrative process. Each district office has an enforcement officer who reviews coastal permits “selectively and depending on our resources,” Gorman said.

“Since there are far more permits than our staff can keep track of, we either try to anticipate those developments likely to give us problems or rely on a neighbor to call and sound the alarm.”

Thanks to a federal grant, the commission is now assisted statewide by 11 interns, usually law students who go out into the field to check whether a developer is complying with permit conditions. But the grant runs out in October, and if it is not renewed and the second round of cuts to the Coastal Commission is approved, enforcement will be minimal, Gorman said.

The state Coastal Conservancy was formed in 1978 in part to coordinate wetland restoration work and in part to handle the chores that the Coastal Commission was too busy to tackle. But the fledgling agency’s budget is small and largely dependent on bond issues. And its clout is limited because it has no regulatory power.

“It’s not easy for me . . . to go and tell the Hunts, who have more money than the state of California, what to do and what not to do with their land,” said the Conservancy’s Jacobson. “We’ve got a carrot, in that we can come up with funds to purchase land and do restoration work. But we definitely have not got a stick.”

There is another problem. Many activities particularly threatening to the wetlands--erosion of watersheds and the stripping of vegetation from hillsides near the lagoons--take place outside the coastal zone and therefore are under no state or federal regulatory pressure at all.

Resource management officials suggest several steps that could be taken to enhance the chances that North County’s lagoons will enjoy a healthy, productive future. First, local citizens can assist state regulators by acting as watchdogs and coordinating lagoon management efforts on the local level.

The Coastal Commission and regional planning bodies, in an effort to balance a property owner’s rights with the need to preserve wetlands, often make compromises that involve the filling in and consequent loss of the resource. While such decisions may be seen individually as doing limited damage to the environment, Jacobson and other officials warn that the cumulative effect of such compromises is a gradual and significant loss of wetland acreage.

Residents can help by arguing for the inherent values of wetlands--as open space, recreational assets, bird watching areas--before their local city councils and planning commissions, which often are under pressure to go easy on major developments because of the tax dollars they bring to the cities.

Many experts believe that a regional management approach is necessary to coordinate protection and restoration of wetlands throughout San Diego County. Many local scientists agree. They are embarking on a project to take “an inventory” of the habitat and wildlife at each of the county’s wetlands in hopes of developing regional management goals.

“We’ve got a real strong hunch that all the nation’s wetlands are connected in some sense,” said Ted Winfield, a biologist with Woodward-Clyde Consultants and one of three scientists working on the project. “So we want to get away from looking at them as separate systems and instead start developing a program that addresses their interrelationships.”

Finally, on a greater scale, the state needs to strengthen enforcement efforts and develop a more coordinated approach to wetland issues, officials say.

“In order to just hang on to those wetlands we’ve got left, it’s absolutely imperative that we develop a comprehensive approach to wetland management and adopt statewide policies and objectives regarding preservation of these areas,” said Eric Metz of the National Audubon Society, who spent seven years as the Coastal Commission’s wetlands coordinator.

A 1984 report on the status and trends of California’s wetlands prepared for an Assembly subcommittee echoes his comments, stating unequivocally:

“Although the state has expressed a public concern for wetlands in a number of ways, general policies and necessary instruments to carry them out are lacking. Without a reliable mix of acquisition, regulated protection and economic incentives it is safe to predict that California’s remaining wetlands will continue to dwindle, acre by acre.”