CalCoast News - Wetlands Restoration

For years, blufftop homeowners have been building concrete structures below their homes to prop up cliffs that are rapidly eroding out from under them. Over the last decade, opposition to those sea walls has been building, led by environmentalists and surfers who say increasingly thin beaches are disappearing without the sand trapped behind the sea walls.

Led by the Surfrider Foundation, these sea-wall opponents have sued several times to stop more sea walls from going up. They often have won the support of the California Coastal Commission, the powerful agency that governs development along the state's 1,100-mile shoreline. In turn, homeowners have sued the commission and petitioned for emergency approvals to get their sea walls built, arguing public safety requires immediate action.

So when a UC San Diego engineering study released Oct. 12 revealed that far more sand is trapped behind those sea walls than was previously believed, sea-wall opponents celebrated.

That same day, the Coastal Commission tried to price sea walls out of existence, hiking a sea-wall fee by more than 1,000 percent. The commission slapped the controversial new $270,000 fee on Solana Beach condominium owners seeking to protect themselves from falling into Fletcher Cove by building a sea wall below their property.

Though largely limited to a narrow strip along San Diego County's western edge, the sea-wall debate swirling around Encinitas and Solana Beach is layered with larger issues: The clash between private-property rights and public access to natural parks. How best to confront the legacy of the past's poor planning decisions. The role of science in government policy. Public safety vs. environmental integrity. Man vs. nature.

And there's a good chance 2006 will prove just as pivotal for the policies governing our unstable coast as its predecessor.

Significant movement
Summer brought what long seemed unthinkable in Solana Beach ---- compromise between blufftop homeowners and the Surfrider Foundation over that small city's coastal policies. Essentially, both sides agreed that homeowners could build sea walls as a last resort, provided they pay mitigation fees for them and allow their permits to expire in 75 years. By winter, the compromise seemed to have been washed away by familiar tides ---- a lawsuit following Coastal Commission opposition to a new sea wall.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers unveiled on Aug. 26 a long-anticipated plan to shore up the Encinitas and Solana Beach shoreline. Everyone welcomed the plan's 50-year guarantee to dump almost 1.3 million cubic yards of new sand on shrinking beaches. However, some environmentalists, fishers and surfers worried that too much sand would bury reefs that shelter animals and push up surfable waves.

The Army Corps also proposed to stabilize eroding sandstone cliffs with so-called "notch infills," or plugs of concrete in the caves undermining the base of the bluffs. The idea was greeted by sea-wall opponents like sand in the face.

The Surfrider activists and their Solana Beach-based allies, CalBeach Advocates, attacked notch infills as "sea walls in disguise." Blufftop homeowners, on the other hand, see them as a sensible compromise. Far less visible than large sea walls, notch infills are made of a sand-colored substance called "erodible concrete" that is supposed to crumble faster than ordinary concrete.

The Army Corps received upwards of a thousand public comments; the government's erosion-fighters are expected to hold another set of hearings on a revised draft sometime in 2006. Some insiders say the notch infills may be pulled from the plan altogether. An Army Corps spokesman failed to respond to repeated inquiries this week.

Compromise in Solana Beach
On Jan. 11, the Solana Beach City Council will take another step toward crafting a Local Coastal Plan, which would grant the city more local control over shoreline development. The state requires all coastal cities to have such a plan, but Solana Beach is the last San Diego County community without one ---- a casualty of the heated debate over sea walls. The city's staff and consultant will be asked this week to merge Solana Beach's many attempts to fashion guidelines for development along the beach and bluffs.

In July, a small committee of coastal partisans offered recommendations for how the city could balance the competing interests of homeowners and sea-wall opponents. Hopes were high after the committee, led by former Mayor Doug Sheres and including a pair of environmental advocates and a pair of lawyers who own homes on the bluffs, offered a widely praised vision for Solana Beach's coastal policies.

As with the Army Corps plan, consensus formed around a central idea: If humans want beaches below the bluffs, we need to dump more sand on thinning beaches that disappear under some high tides.

But the committee also forged compromises that have long eluded the armed camps of Solana Beach's bitter sea-wall debate. For one, the recommendations acknowledged that the bluffs are likely to remain buttressed by sea walls of some kind ---- a big concession by local sea-wall opponents. The recommendations also allowed that sea-wall permits would expire by 2080 and that homeowners would pay rent on the sea walls ---- big concessions by blufftop homeowners.

Beaches behind walls
The peace didn't last long: When the Army Corps called in August for notch infills to protect the bluffs, Surfrider activists attacked the plan as protecting private homes with public tax dollars. That the city of New Orleans was just then being inundated by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters didn't inspire confidence in the Army Corps' brand of engineered shoreline solutions.

On Oct. 12, UC San Diego graduate student Adam Young and engineering professor Scott Ashford released a report entitled "Quantifying Sea Cliff Sediment Contributions" whose widely publicized findings seemed to validate one of the sea-wall opponents' central arguments. Young and Ashford used lasers to measure the width of the bluffs and computers to compare data from 1998 and 2004. They estimated that 68 percent of the sand sitting on local beaches had crumbled off the cliffs; previous estimates put the bluffs' contribution to beach sand at closer to 10 percent.

Though Ashford and Young attempted to stay above the fray, their study immediately rocked the sea-wall debate. Their conclusions indicate that sea walls are trapping much more of the beach than their builders have had us believe. Natural-erosion advocates like the Surfrider Foundation activists and lawyers, who argue that protecting private homes atop the bluffs starves the public beaches below of sand, seized upon the study as validation for their struggle against the "armoring" of the coast.

But other scientists said the UCSD pair's data were too slim to draw such broad conclusions, while blufftop homeowners blasted the survey as weak and misleading.

Las Brisas lawsuits
Even as Young and Ashford were discussing their findings at Fletcher Cove, the Coastal Commission was launching its own sortie against sea walls at a meeting in downtown San Diego. Their target was the condominiums just south of Fletcher Cove, the 36-unit Las Brisas complex. The commission approved a 120-foot-long, 35-foot-tall sea wall sought by Las Brisas ---- on the condition that the condo owners pay $270,000 in fees for the sand to be trapped behind that vertical concrete, including a new $248,000 fee for the "lost recreational value" that the sand would represent.

That "lost recreational value" was computed by Phillip King, a San Francisco State University economist who is among the leading experts in determining the recreational value of beaches. To tally the cost to Solana Beach of the missing beach's appeal to visitors and residents alike, King analyzed the number of cars in the Fletcher Cove parking lot and confirmed his estimates with local lifeguards. King calculated that Solana Beach stands to lose between 30 to 40 cents per day for each of the 40,000 people annually who won't visit the Fletcher Cove beach, which would be shrunken by 1,200 cubic feet because of the sand trapped behind the proposed Las Brisas sea wall.

That sea wall, still stuck in Sacramento red tape, provided 2005 with a bookend pair of lawsuits. In January, the Surfrider Foundation sued Solana Beach for the city's emergency construction permit for the Las Brisas sea wall; that suit is still pending. In December, Las Brisas condo owners filed a suit of their own against the Coastal Commission to overturn the "lost recreational value" fee.

Meanwhile, the bluffs below Las Brisas receded almost two feet in recent weeks, according to Bob Trettin, a consultant working for the homeowners association. "It's kind of scary," he said.

Multifront war on sea walls
Fears are mounting among the blufftop homeowners, Trettin said. Without a simple formula for determining the "lost recreational value" for each beach below a proposed sea wall, homeowners face the prospect of hiring their own economists on top of geologists, engineers and lawyers.

It's also worth noting that King's analysis of the fee for Las Brisas ---- which spiked the fee by more than 1,000 percent ---- was based upon old data regarding the amount of sand trapped behind sea walls. If the Coastal Commission adopts the new estimates reported by Ashford and Young, the fees could soar again.

Another state agency is also asking blufftop homeowners to ante up. The State Lands Commission oversees the wet sand behind the high-tide mark on the public's behalf. It has long charged homeowners rent for sea walls that intrude on this publicly owned land, but is only just starting to collect that money.

The architect of the State Lands Commission's aggressive policy is North County native Lorena Gonzalez, an advisor to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante who is running for San Diego City Council. She is also the sister of Marco Gonzalez, an environmental attorney who as chairman of the local Surfrider chapter helped start the momentum against sea walls five years ago.

All this opposition from the state makes the Army Corps' next draft of its plan all that more important for Solana Beach and Encinitas blufftop homeowners. If the Army Corps plan still calls for notch infills, the homeowners could get their bluff protection paid for by the federal government. If it doesn't, they could be paying great sums of money to the state for the same protection ---- if they can build at all before nature brings down the house.