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IN THIS ISSUE – COVID Confusion in the Capitol
COVID-19 RECOVERY
- Senate & Assembly Disagree on How to Convene – “It’s A Weird Dynamic”
- Governor’s COVID-19 Emergency Contracts Questioned
- All Mail Elections, Saving Grace or Another Catastrophe?
NATURAL RESOURCES
- Last Snowpack Survey Confirms Dry Winter; 41% of State in Drought
- He Wanted Peace, But Ignited Another Water War
- Oil Market Glut Visible: Supertankers Park Off California Coast
- Sea-Level Rise Prompts “Very Tense” Confrontation on “Managed Retreat” from Coast
FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAY 1, 2020
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests. Please feel free to forward.
Stay current daily! For our focused updates via Twitter: @jrgualco / @robertjgore / @gualcogroup
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Senate & Assembly Disagree on How to Convene – “It’s A Weird Dynamic”
Sacramento Bee
In the California Capitol, the Senate and Assembly traditionally operate under similar rules, but not when it comes to the coronavirus.
Lawmakers from both houses left the Capitol last month because of the coronavirus outbreak. They passed a measure allowing Gov. Gavin Newsom to spend $1.1 billion to fight the virus, and put their legislative session on hiatus.
Since then, the two chambers have set different dates for when they expect lawmakers to return to the Capitol. The Assembly reconvenes on Monday; the Senate is waiting one more week and returning on May 11.
And, even though they share the same attorneys, the Assembly and Senate came to different decisions on whether remote voting is allowed by the state’s constitution.
The Assembly concluded remote voting could be unconstitutional, potentially exposing the Legislature to open meeting violations and leaving laws vulnerable to legal challenges.
“We were told that it was not something our attorney felt was constitutional,” said Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood. “So we chose to follow that advice. (Remote participation) is a constitutional issue and it requires changes to the constitution, to state statute, joint rules and also our Assembly rules. It’s quite a process.”
The Senate, based on the same legal advice, passed an emergency resolution that allows senators to participate and vote remotely as long as a member convenes the meeting in-person at the Capitol.
Counsel for the Legislature did not return a request for an on-the-record interview.
To avoid constitutional uncertainties, Rendon’s team developed a plan to ensure a safe return to the Capitol.
Anyone entering the building will get their temperature taken, he said, and only one person at a time is allowed in the elevators.
Remote testimony is encouraged during committee meetings, which will take place in three large hearing rooms. Those entering the building will exit through a separate entrance, to avoid cross traffic and congestion.
Members will need to limit themselves mostly to their offices, except for when they have committee obligations. Caucus meetings will be conducted remotely, Rendon said.
It’s a “pretty well thought-out plan” that’s been worked on for six to seven weeks, Rendon explained.
Neither house has had to vote on a bill since March 16, when the Legislature recessed.
Representatives for Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins’ office said remote participation won’t jeopardize open meeting requirements. They said the Senate resolution allows lawmakers, who skew older, to advance legislative and district priorities from afar.
Atkins’ office said the Senate might not end up using remote voting. And if it does, members will be asked to submit written communication to the Senate Daily Journal, which keeps a record of legislative activity.
Rendon and Atkins have always had a strong working relationship, Rendon said. The current crisis, however, has shifted priorities from shared legislative visions to separate concerns. He said the first he’d heard about the Senate’s delayed return was when Atkins’ office issued a press release.
“It’s a weird dynamic because we’re not in the same building as we normally are,” Rendon said. “There’s more reasons to talk when you’re talking about legislation. The focus now has been on resources and referrals and relief efforts. We’ve communicated when we’ve needed to but I feel we have a different work product now than we normally do.”
Some lawmakers have shared concerns that working from the Capitol could expose members to personal health and safety risks.
During a recent Democratic caucus conference, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, expressed worry over carrying the virus back and forth from Sacramento to her district. She supported the idea that members get tested before reconvening to “ensure they are not contributing to the spread of COVID,” according to her office.
Members older than 65 and with pre-existing health conditions will be excused from session, Rendon said. But lawmakers in a recent letter asked Rendon to consider remote participation so members at-risk to severe COVID-19 infection can continue their work without being in the Capitol.
Others are more keen to return, knowing that this year’s bill and budgetary priorities will be among the most important decisions ever made by California lawmakers sent to Sacramento to advocate for their district.
“I want to do whatever public health officers think is prudent. And I want to get back to work,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego. “To go back up and fight for resources.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article242359886.html?#storylink=cpy
Governor’s COVID-19 Emergency Contracts Questioned
Sacramento Bee
Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart first wondered if his satellite-launching company could help California build more ventilators on a Saturday morning in March while reading about shortages forcing doctors in other parts of the world to ration the lifesaving machines.
He reached out to a friend who knows Gov. Gavin Newsom personally. By about 8 p.m., after a flurry of emails, Hart was meeting with the state’s top emergency medical services official and a UC Irvine doctor working to develop a simplified version of the machine called a bridge ventilator.
Three days later, a team of Virgin Orbit engineers who normally design rockets had developed its first prototype. About two weeks into the project, Hart traveled to Sacramento to show the governor their design that relies on a windshield wiper motor.
Now, Hart says the state is paying the company to produce 600 bridge ventilators at an initial price of $2,000 apiece to help hospitals treat a surge in coronavirus patients.
The Virgin Orbit contract is just one of the deals the Newsom administration has struck with private businesses in the last few weeks on a rapid timeline and under intense pressure to secure lifesaving equipment in an increasingly competitive market. The state is already spending more than $2 billion on coronavirus response, with most of that money going to private companies producing medical equipment and protective gear, according to Newsom’s finance department.
The pandemic has pushed Newsom to form new partnerships with businesses and tap existing private-sector relationships dating back to his days in San Francisco city government.
A former businessman himself, Newsom said his administration has been “very aggressive in reaching out to the private sector” for help and has praised companies like Virgin Orbit for “meeting this moment” by producing needed gear for the state. He says at least 350 manufacturers have told his administration they want to convert their facilities to produce hand sanitizer, protective equipment and other supplies.
In the meantime, there’s been little public scrutiny of the agreements the state has made to buy those products. The Newsom administration has denied lawmakers’ and journalists’ requests to see the state’s biggest contract – a $1 billion agreement with Chinese company BYD to make hundreds of millions of masks – saying that releasing details could jeopardize the shipments.
The administration has been slow to release other smaller contracts, too. It took two weeks for the administration to provide The Bee a contract showing the state is paying the Sacramento Kings basketball franchise $1.5 million to convert its old arena into an emergency hospital.
Administration officials say they are still working to provide other contracts through a records request for a wide range of government contracts related to testing, ventilators and protective gear filed by The Bee more than a month ago.
“It’s more critical now than ever before for the Legislature to exercise its oversight authority,” state Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, said during a budget hearing earlier this month. “Large contracts are being let, we don’t know what they’re all about, monies are being obligated, and our budget is also being affected.”
The Legislature is responsible for overseeing the state’s expenditures, but lawmakers argue they have been sidelined during the pandemic. They passed a law giving Newsom authority to spend up to $1.1 billion on emergency response, but say they haven’t been given detailed information about how the administration is using the money.
Lawmakers have requested but not yet received a number of contracts from the administration, including those for two hospitals the state is spending $30 million to lease, Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek said during an Assembly budget hearing last week.
They’ve raised the most concerns about the state’s nearly $1 billion contract with BYD.
Earlier this month, lawmakers gave Newsom permission to pay $495 million to a California-based BYD subsidiary up front as part of the deal, but asked that the administration provide them the full details of the contract.
After the money was wired, administration officials said they don’t plan to show lawmakers or the public the contract until they have “assurances” the masks will arrive. They’ve cited intense competition in the market and concerns that something could jeopardize the shipment if more details are released.
The administration will release the contract once all the supplies have arrived, Office of Emergency Services spokesman Brian Ferguson said Tuesday.
The $990 million agreement spans 2.5 months and will result in 200 million masks per month, administration officials have said. Lawmakers have requested the exact cost per mask, but the administration has declined to provide it publicly.
Some Republican lawmakers questioned whether the masks could have been purchased more cheaply if the administration had taken time to seek California manufacturers to produce them.
State contracts usually are subject to a competitive process. The administration didn’t solicit multiple bids for the contract because global mask shortages limited the state’s options, Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, told lawmakers at the Assembly hearing. He said the state still negotiated a “very good price.”
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said they wanted more information about the agreement.
“I find it particularly troubling that we’re talking about a $1 billion contract for resources that we don’t have details of,” Assemblywoman Christy Smith, D-Santa Clarita, said during the Assembly budget hearing. “That is a story that at some point needs to be told.”
In cases where it’s not possible for the administration to make contracts public, it should at least find a way to share them with lawmakers, said Dan Schnur, who formerly led the state’s political ethics watchdog commission and worked for former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. Schnur pointed to the White House’s practice of sharing national security information with the top eight lawmakers in Congress to keep sensitive details secret while still allowing the legislature oversight of the executive branch.
“It seems to me that a similar approach could be set up on these contracts even if the governor’s office isn’t comfortable making the information public in real time,” he said. “A state level ‘gang of eight’ could be a way of providing oversight without compromising the purchase.”
Although it’s the Legislature’s job to push for more details about the contract as part of its oversight role, state Sen. Holly Mitchell said she ultimately trusts Newsom’s judgment surrounding the BYD deal.
“Is it ideal that they aren’t able to share the specifics of the contract with us? Of course not,” the Los Angeles Democrat told reporters earlier this month. “Do I understand the circumstances under which he made the decision he felt was in the best interest of California? I absolutely understand.”
State government has worked closely with the private sector before, but the coronavirus outbreak has accelerated the pace.
“There was a new energy around public and private projects,” said Dr. Jessica Mega, co-founder and chief medical and scientific officer for Verily Life Sciences. “In some ways we’ve never really seen this kind of urgency.”
Verily is one of several companies the state is contracting with to provide diagnostic testing. Mega said the state was looking for a platform that could screen potential patients and connect them with testing on a large scale. As it turned out, Verily had been working on such a platform for several years prior to the pandemic.
The platform coordinates a patient’s whole testing experience, from the initial online screening survey to generating the personalized bar code labels for the testing samples, she said.
The state’s Department of Public Health has contracted with Verily to provide testing in several California counties, Mega said, including Santa Clara, San Mateo and Sacramento.
Other companies have changed their manufacturing processes or pivoted to provide different services to fill state needs.
One such company, Bloom Energy, struck a deal with the administration to refurbish hundreds of ventilators after the governor called for companies to help the state increase its stock, Newsom said.
The fuel cell company’s CEO, KR Sridhar, asked the governor for one broken ventilator and had a team of engineers repair it within 24 hours. Now it has deals with state governments in California, Delaware and Pennsylvania to repair the machines, said Bloom spokesman Justin Saia.
In a few days, Sridhar went from knowing “nothing about ventilators” to serving as the state’s go-to source for ventilator repair, Newsom said during a press conference at Bloom Energy last month.
Saia said he couldn’t give cost estimates for the ventilator refurbishment because it varies from machine to machine depending on how much work is required to repair it. Bloom is refurbishing the devices essentially at cost, Saia said.
“We’re not in this for financial gain,” Saia said. “We’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do.”
Virgin Orbit received federal approval for its bridge ventilators last week. Hart said its contract, which has yet to be made public, is with California’s Emergency Medical Services Authority.
The bridge ventilator work has allowed him to get some of his engineers back to work after Hart sent most of Virgin Orbit’s workers home because of coronavirus, he said.
“It’s been therapeutic for the whole team because the hardest part of this crisis is the feeling of helplessness and not knowing what to do,” Hart said. “It was a gift for us to get this idea.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article242337136.html?#storylink=cpy
All Mail Elections, Saving Grace or Another Catastrophe?
CalMatters
Regardless of what happens nationally, California is headed toward vote-by-mail. For the past four decades, California has been loosening restrictions on what used to be called absentee voting and changing laws on voter registration and other election procedures.
Today, the vast majority of California’s votes are cast by mail, so making it universal for November would seem to be a fairly easy process.
“In a worst-case, but very plausible, scenario, the state would have to go to what is effectively an all-mail election system, one in which in-person voting would be reserved for those who have language barriers, disabilities, require in-person assistance, or need to complete a same-day registration,” election data guru Paul Mitchell said in a recent newspaper article.
“Our increase in by-mail voting over the last two decades could be our saving grace,” Mitchell added.
Democrats do believe that mail voting will help them win close elections, and Republicans fear that they are right. However, the Public Policy Institute of California, in a recent report,contends that those hopes and fears may be misplaced, saying, “these scenarios describe the status quo; they don’t tell us how election results might change if vote by mail became more widely available. When election jurisdictions — including some California counties — have rapidly expanded vote by mail, neither major party has clearly benefited.”
So what’s not to like about all-mail voting?
One worrisome factor is that mail voting, coupled with same-day registration and provisional ballots, not only creates an election month, rather than an election day, but has meant weeks-long delays in vote-counting. Voting in the March 3 presidential primary began in early February and final tallies weren’t completed until last week, after Gov. Gavin Newsom gave officials an additional three weeks.
Another potential problem is that local election officials gain a huge amount of power to affect close elections by deciding which mail ballots are valid, as shown by what’s happening in San Joaquin County regarding a three-way contest for the 13th Assembly District.
Second place — and thus a spot on the November ballot — was decided by 30 votes in a final report issued by the county’s registrar of voters, Melinda Dubroff, on April 5, even though Newsom’s order gave her until April 24 to complete the count. The candidate on the short end complained that in her rush, Dubroff disregarded affidavits from 32 voters that their ballots had been improperly discarded, and the situation is now in court for resolution.
Finally, there’s “ballot harvesting,” which Democrats used two years ago to capture congressional seats in Southern California. It refers to party workers collecting ballots in person, on the promise to deliver them for counting. It’s illegal in some states but is authorized in California by a law former Gov. Jerry Brown signed in 2016.
Vote harvesting is not fraud unto itself but could be manipulated to make a difference in close elections, essentially violating the sanctity of the voting booth.
There’s nothing wrong per se with mail voting. But it should be a step forward, not backward.
Last Snowpack Survey Confirms Dry Winter; 41% of State in Drought
Sacramento Bee
The last Sierra Nevada snowpack measurement of the season on Thursday confirmed what California officials have feared for months: The state has suffered through a dry winter.
The state Department of Water Resources announced that the snow was just 1.5 inches deep at its traditional measuring spot at Phillips Station, a vast field off Highway 50 near Echo Summit. The “snow water equivalent” was just a half an inch, or just 3 percent of average for this time of year.
The Phillips measurement was an outlier. A broader measurement taken by 130 electronic sensors throughout the Sierra revealed an average snow water equivalent of 8.4 inches, or 37 percent of average for this time of year.
The snow readings help the state’s hydrologists forecast how much runoff will flow into California’s rivers and reservoirs this summer.
“March and April storms brought needed snow to the Sierras, with the snowpack reaching its peak on April 9. However, those gains were not nearly enough to offset a very dry January and February,” said Sean de Guzman, chief of DWR’s snow survey and water supply forecasts. “The last two weeks have seen increased temperatures leading to a rapid reduction of the snowpack. Snowmelt runoff into the reservoirs is forecasted to be below average.”
The peak recorded April 9 was just 66 percent of average.
Separately, the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly survey run by the federal government of hydrologic conditions, said 41 percent of California is in drought. That includes “extreme drought” conditions covering about 5 percent of California in the northwest corner of the state.
While the Sierra snowpack typically accounts for 30 percent of the state’s annual supply, California is benefiting from the unusually strong rains of a year ago, leaving its major reservoirs in good condition for the dry summer months ahead. Officially, California has been out of drought since 2017.
Still, the state’s water situation remains precarious over the long haul. A recent study by scientists at Columbia University said California and the West are suffering through
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article242411941.html#storylink=cpy
He Wanted Peace, But Ignited Another Water War
Sacramento Bee
From the moment he took office, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he wanted to bring peace to California’s water wars. But now, more than a year later, most of the warring factions are united against his plan for governing the Delta.
Three of the most powerful groups in California water sued the state this week over Newsom’s two-month-old plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the hub of California’s complex water delivery network.
A coalition of environmental groups charged Wednesday that Newsom’s plan, released in late March, doesn’t do nearly enough to protect Chinook salmon and other endangered species from the perils that occur when water is pumped through the Delta to farms and cities in the southern half of the state.
On the other side, local agencies that get deliveries from the State Water Project and the federal government’s Central Valley Project filed their own lawsuits, saying Newsom went overboard in setting restrictions on water pumping that will result in significant new restrictions on supplies.
The state contractors, in a suit filed in Fresno Superior Court, said the Department of Water Resources and Department of Fish & Wildlife ignored scientific evidence showing that more water could be sent south “without causing additional adverse impacts to the Delta.”
The hail of litigation, filed in a space of 24 hours, seems to leave Newsom’s vision of peace in tatters.
Lisa Lien-Mager, a spokeswoman for Newsom’s Natural Resources Agency said the administration “stands behind” its plan for operating the Delta. She said it “strikes a necessary balance” between environmental protection and meeting the needs of the water suppliers.”
The State Water Project and Central Valley Project pull billions of gallons of water out of the Delta and pump it to their respective customers in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, serving millions of acres of farmland and about 25 million people.
But decades of pumping have ravaged the Delta’s eco-system and sent smelt, salmon and other species to the brink of extinction.
Newsom took office pledging to find solutions that would work for all sides. He tried to find common ground with the mostly agricultural Central Valley Project water districts on a plan, known as the voluntary settlement agreement, for allocating water from the state’s most important rivers.
He tried to negotiate with the Trump administration, which operates the Central Valley Project, on governing operations in the Delta.
Recently, though, his efforts at peace-making have evolved into familiar strategies of litigation. In February, as President Donald Trump was visiting Bakersfield to discuss water policy, Newsom announced he would sue the federal government over Trump’s plans to deliver more water through the Delta.
Now, Newsom’s own operations plan for the Delta is drawing fire from environmentalists and water users alike. And the voluntary settlement agreement – a far-reaching water-sharing effort brokered by former Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration – appears to be falling apart.
Jennifer Pierre of the State Water Contractors said Newsom’s plan for the Delta “effectively ends the historic Voluntary Agreement process that brought together water agencies, regulators and conservation groups to tackle decades-old water resource problems.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article242386816.html#storylink=cpy
Oil Market Glut Visible: Supertankers Park Off California Coast
National Public Radio
The scale of oil market turbulence is on stark display along the California coast. About three dozen massive oil tankers are anchored from Los Angeles and Long Beach up to San Francisco Bay, turning into floating storage for crude oil that is in short demand because of the coronavirus.
About 20 million barrels of crude are on board the tankers, according to Reid I’Anson, global commodity economist at Kpler, a data company. “That is definitely far outside what is normal for the region,” he says, referring to California’s coastline. “Typically, we’ll not see more than, you know, maybe 5 million barrels tops kind of floating.”
With dramatically fewer cars on the road and planes in the sky, I’Anson says there is a limited need recently for gasoline and jet fuel. That has caused a glut in the market and a shortage of onshore storage.
Keeping oil on tankers is not optimal. “It’s very expensive to hold this crude on these vessels,” I’Anson says. But there are few alternatives. “What else are you going to do? There’s nowhere else you can take this crude … globally, no one needs crude right now.”
The U.S. Coast Guard is monitoring the increasing number of large vessels around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to make sure there are no collisions or groundings, and to see if the tankers are discharging oil or sewage into the water.
“Things are pretty crowded,” says Capt. Kip Louttit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, an arm of the Coast Guard that operates vessel traffic service.
He says currently there are 26 ships anchored off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — triple the number normally seen there. They include three cruise ships and 20 tankers, according to Louttit. “Our information is that one may be out there as long as July,” he says.
Louttit describes the congestion as abnormal but says it does happen from time to time. In 2014 and 2015, an unusually large number of container ships also anchored along the coast, he recalls.
There are 48 designated places to anchor ships at Los Angeles and Long Beach. Some arriving vessels are having to navigate around the idled tankers, but Louttit says the anchored ships are off to the side of the traffic lanes.
https://www.kvpr.org/post/dozens-oil-tankers-wait-californias-coast-pandemic-dents-demand
Sea-Level Rise Prompts “Very Tense” Coastal Pull-Back Confrontation…aka “Managed Retreat”
CalMatters
The view from high up in Del Mar’s 17th Street lifeguard station is a visit-California poster: a sweeping curve of sand, dramatic coastal bluffs, a welcoming sea. What scientists see, though, is somewhat more sobering: the Pacific Ocean as seething menace, a marine battering ram born of climate change that will inexorably claim more and more land and whatever sits upon it.
With rising seas now posing a greater threat to California’s economy than wildfires or severe earthquakes, state authorities are cautioning those who live along some of the Golden State’s famous beaches to do what they’re loath to do: retreat. Turn their backs to the sea and move homes, businesses, schools and critical infrastructure out of harm’s way.
The ocean could rise two to ten feet by 2100, imperiling $150 billion in property, according to state estimates, and erasing two-thirds of California’s beaches. But even in the long history of battles at the beach, pitting the regulatory power of the California Coastal Commission against local governments and homeowners, managing people away from the water is proving especially difficult along most of the state’s shores.
“Very tense,” according to the commission’s executive director, Jack Ainsworth.
Here’s how it’s playing out. Cities and towns that hug the ocean, in what the state refers to as the “coastal zone,” must submit development projects and other long-term plans to the Coastal Commission for approval. The agency has asked that, as part of that process, local officials plan for the inevitability of sea rise and consider how to relocate vulnerable structures to safer ground. The commission has provided more than $8 million in taxpayer money to coastal towns to help fund the complex planning.
Among the possibilities is managed retreat, a purposeful, planned relocation of people and infrastructure away from the shoreline and the risk of rising seas. The commission’s statewide guidance asks that coastal cities consider how to phase in such a policy, but it stops short of requiring them to do it. And most haven’t.
At first, discussions between the commission and local authorities went fairly smoothly. Some communities understood the risk and welcomed advice, even adopting managed retreat as an option in early versions of their plans.
But then, for many local residents the words “managed retreat’’ came to stand in for two more dire words: “eminent domain,” government taking private property. Officials repeatedly tried to make clear that there is no policy to forcibly take homes. But the mistaken impression took hold, and it’s proven nearly impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
In public meetings across California, homeowners, developers and real estate groups began to pelt local officials with questions: Is the state going to take my home? What about property values? How can I be sure I’ll be able to get insurance?
What the state saw as a prudent, forward-thinking approach to an admittedly slow-moving disaster begat a full-on coastal revolt. Under pressure from constituents, towns that had included managed retreat in their plans tore up the documents and called a time out. In some cities, the controversy hijacked the entire coastal planning process and adoption of other, noncontroversial aspects of coastal planning has languished.
“Things were going fine with local plans and residents were mostly receptive to managed retreat as an option. Then they blew up,” Ainsworth said. Some Coastal Commission meetings were consumed by the topic.
“There was a lot of misinformation and fear,” he said. “Some of it was understandable. But there was also a pretty well organized campaign that just took over the narrative.”
To attorney Larry Salzman, director of litigation for the conservative property-rights group Pacific Legal Foundation, the commission has been heavy-handed, favoring relocation over armoring the coast with sea walls, jettys and other barriers intended to protect homes.
An armored coast can mean smaller beaches, something the Coastal Commission doesn’t want to see. But it’s a tradeoff many homeowners are willing to make, at least for now. Groups that oppose managed retreat say they should be allowed to stay where they are and allowed to put up whatever defenses they can to protect their residences.
The commission is “putting pressure on local governments to adopt a permitting standard that makes it impossible for homeowners to protect their property in the face of advancing hazards,” said Salzman, who has sued the Coastal Commission on behalf of homeowners. “Coastal property owners have a right to safeguard their property as long as they don’t impinge on others.”
In the face of such political blowback, some officials are shirking their responsibility to plan for their community’s future, said Coastal Commission member Sara Aminzadeh.
“There’s managed retreat, and there’s unmanaged retreat,” she said, arguing that it’s cheaper and more efficient to plan for catastrophe than to respond once it arrives. “It’s a great disappointment to me to see local leaders take the easy way out. In my heart I feel that leaders of all levels of government need to step up. It’s their responsibility.”
Many of the charming homes that front the beach in the upscale San Diego County enclave of Del Mar — population 4,400 —are raised on berms and crouched behind piles of large boulders and concrete sea walls. The Coastal Commission says the residences are nevertheless at risk of being taken by the sea in coming decades, and the city ought to have a plan to move them back.
But city officials see it differently, saying the row of oceanfront homes is itself a bulwark for the neighborhoods behind it. “If those sea walls come down, and the homes moved, then all the houses behind them that are only two to three feet above sea level will be inundated from the ocean,” said David Druker, a member of the Del Mar City Council.
The notion of backing off the coast is anathema in a tourist town that attracts more than a million annual visitors to wide beaches, nautical-themed boutiques and seaside restaurants. While its government is at an impasse with the Coastal Commission on long-term planning, the advancing sea is not.
And as in many coastal cities, the rising ocean makes managing flooding from other sources — winter storms, a swollen river — more difficult. On a recent rainy day, the parking lot around the famed Del Mar racetrack and the adjacent county fairgrounds was a vast inland lake.
Officials are considering building a berm there to prevent future flooding. Druker pointed out a nearby bridge that needs to be raised several feet to escape higher tides, and the rail corridor along the coast is due for a $5 billion realignment inland.
Druker said city officials accept the science of climate change and know the sea is rising. What he wants is more flexibility from the state, more research on timelines and a better understanding of what it means to relocate families and businesses: What is the legal mechanism for it? Who pays? What are the anticipated long-term effects on the community?
State officials say they want to help and are considering ways to accelerate research and funding for responses to climate change.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a $4.75 billion climate-resilience bond measure for the fall ballot as one possible funding source. Another is legislation that would establish a loan fund to allow coastal cities to relocate critical infrastructure and pay willing sellers to move. An additional proposal would codify the Coastal Commission’s authority to regulate issues related to rising seas and provide additional money for coastal planning.
Those proposals are in limbo at the moment, as the state’s response to the coronavirus threat has blown the budget and has swept many plans off the table.
As Del Mar residents aired their concerns at city meetings and listening sessions, the message became clear: Say no to retreat.
“Those beachfront residences are anywhere from $8 million to $40 million-dollar homes,” said Csilla Crouch, a local real estate agent. She said her home, a few blocks from the beach, would eventually be washed away if any of the oceanfront houses were to be removed.
Until the city council made it clear recently that it was not considering planned retreat, Crouch said, potential buyers continued to express concerns about the policy.
“If a buyer is thinking about a multimillion-dollar home and learns that there is a threat of eminent domain, do you think he’s going to buy? Probably not,” she said.
Unlike tony Del Mar, the working-class town of Imperial Beach sits across a polluted river from the Mexican city of Tijuana. In this southernmost settlement on California’s 1,000-mile coastline, nearly 30% of the children live in poverty.
Flooding is already common in this community bordered by water on three sides — by the Pacific, the Tijuana River estuary and the San Diego Bay — all causing problems for the city. Imperial Beach is moving infrastructure such as sewer lines away from the shore and pondering how to protect a vulnerable elementary school. So-called king tides, which are dangerously high tides that are made worse by the rising sea, can flood the town with three feet of seawater and drown the main street, Seacoast Drive.
Local officials commissioned a study that concluded as much as 40% of the city could flood much more often as the ocean continues to rise. With that in mind, the city’s coastal plan had entertained the possibility of moving some of the town’s 28,000 residents away from its nearly flat shoreline.
But with each public meeting on the issue, residents responded with anger and fear. Sessions convened to discuss such coastal planning issues as development and building regulations were taken over by bickering and shouting about the scourge of managed retreat.
“We couldn’t discuss anything else,” said City Councilman Ed Spriggs. “There’s been nothing like it.”
The conflict has driven Mayor Serge Dedina, a lifelong surfer who directs a local environmental group, away from his previous support for retreat. The city had imagined moving itself three blocks inland, but the public uproar and financial calculations caused him to rethink.
Dedina complains that less wealthy cities, like his, are not equipped to pay for wide-ranging retrofits with more pressing issues such as infrastructure upgrades and cleanup of the sewage-polluted river.
“The reality is, there’s no funding for us to do anything, and we have no intention of taking anyone’s home away,” he said. “The Coastal Commission is spending all this time on the managed retreat conflict and nothing else is getting done.”
Coastal plans codify a number of key local rules, including zoning standards, building permitting and even vacation-home rental controls. Some cities have found it difficult to come to agreement on any of those issues while managed retreat remains on the table.
“So for us the question is: Why did we even do this (planning)?” Dedina said. “It’s an absolute waste of our time because instead of figuring out how to protect our coast, we got in a battle over managed retreat, and that is not helping our city at all.”
Brenda Clark was walking on the beach recently with her yellow lab, Cooper. She’s lived in a shorefront condo since 2010, tucked behind a nine-foot seawall. Clark said she’s followed the public debate but doesn’t think moving back from the water should be a priority for Imperial Beach.
“I have lived at the beach my whole life,” she said, and experience has taught her that nature will nearly always defeat attempts to impede it. “I am concerned about property values, of course. But if you buy a house by the ocean, figure it out.”
Not everyone is so sanguine.
Jennifer Savage, California policy manager for the Surfrider Foundation, which advocates for beach preservation, said local officials should be mindful not to sacrifice public beaches in order to protect vacation homes.
She likens the crowding of homes and businesses along the swelling sea to building subdivisions in high-wildfire-risk areas.
“We have developed in such a way that we cannot maintain the status quo with the changes in the natural world,” Savage said. “We can’t get to solutions because people have this very emotional reaction to managed retreat.
“They dig in and don’t face the facts,” she said. “The reality is: The water is coming.”