California’s Coastal Commission has shut down the last beach-sand mine in the United States, operated by the Mexico-based Cemex company. Coastal Commission boss Jack Ainsworth told reporters, “This settlement is an incredible victory for the public.” Taxpayers might not think so. The Commission blamed Cemex for erosion along Monterey Bay. Company official Walker Robinson…
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As anybody looking for a house or apartment can easily verify, California is in the throes of a housing crisis. In Oroville, for example, many low-income residents live in 1960s-vintage housing built for dam construction workers. Across the state, home ownership rates are the lowest since the 1940s and according to California’s Housing Future:…
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Residents and visitors alike know that getting around the Bay Area is not exactly a walk in the park. A $2.4 billion Transbay Transit Center is slated to open in December, but as San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross note, this highly touted “Grand Central Station of the West,” will wind up…
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“We are not now in deficit, we were never in deficit and we won’t be in deficit at the end of the year.” That was Susan Hansch, chief deputy director of the California Coastal Commission last August, explaining that the CCC had received almost enough money to repay $1.45 million from the state Department of Finance. According…
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The Sacramento Bee is disturbed that the Assembly has derailed SB 1190, which would ban lobbying of California Coastal Commission members. Lobbyists had set up meetings between commissioners and David “The Edge” Evans, a guitarist with U2, who sought to build a house in Malibu, and members of the Newport Banning Ranch Project in…
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Government waste abounds in California but is not always easy to spot. Veteran observer Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee suggests a hard look at “overlapping and utterly confusing governmental entities that cloud accountability.” His first example is the California Coastal Commission, by some accounts the most powerful land-use body in the nation, and…
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On February 10 in Morro Bay, the California Coastal Commission (CCC) fired its executive director Charles Lester. For any government body to fire the boss is exceedingly rare, and this case should prove educational for all Californians. For one thing, what Lester had done wrong remained unclear. On his watch, no major environmental disaster…
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As Tony Barboza notes in the Los Angeles Times, the California Coastal Commission is “the most powerful land-use agency in the nation” and some of the 12 commissioners want to fire the boss, Charles Lester. This action should serve as a timely reminder for Californians of the abuse they face at the hands of…
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The California Coastal Commission (CCC) is an unelected body of regulatory zealots that overrides the elected governments of coastal counties and cities on issues of land use and property rights. As we recently noted, the powerful CCC is moving into animal management, trying to leverage SeaWorld into killing off its orca shows. Now the…
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The California Coastal Commission (CCC) is an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of coastal counties and cities on issues of land use and property rights. As we recently noted, the powerful CCC is moving into animal management, trying to leverage SeaWorld into killing off its orca shows. As Dan Walters of the…
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