The guiding law regarding ownership of beaches in California is the California Constitution,, which prohibits ownership of beaches and tidelands (defined as either the high water mark or the start of vegetation, depending upon which is higher). In other words, you can’t own a beach in California, regardless of what Vinod the Vile insists.
The guiding law regarding access to beaches is the California Coastal Act of 1976. This Act was intended to protect access to the coast by maintaining, at a minimum, the amount of access that was available in 1976. The Coastal Act created a new kind of property, access rights, which are created either by use in 1976 or by signing over access rights afterwards. Access rights are similar to the concept of a right-of-way, where an entity has the right to pass through a property on a specified corridor in order to perform some public good such as, say, provide and maintain electrical lines. In the case of coastal access rights, the entity in question is the general public of the State of California, and the public good provided is the beach.
Access rights can be total, conditional, or none, based on what the situation was in 1976. The Coastal Commission was required to inventory and document by the end of 1981 access to all of the beaches of California. Once inventoried, landowners had to maintain the level of access that was provided at that point. If they provided no access, they could continue providing no access or they could voluntarily sell a right-of-way to the State if they so desired. If they provided conditional access, they had to continue providing conditional access under the exact same terms as when the Act was passed, and were required to get a permit if they wanted to change the amount of access they provided in any way. And if they provided full access… well, same deal. They had to continue doing so, and again, would have to get a permit if they wanted to change the amount of access they provided in any way.
The Act doesn’t require the Coastal Commission to grant a permit. Indeed, the Coastal Commission can deny a permit if a) it would reduce access to the beach, and b) there is no documented ecological or environmental reason or documented public safety reason for reducing access to the beach. The Act calls for maximizing access to the beach, thus is crafted such as to deny permits that would reduce access unless there is an ecological or documented public safety reason for denying access to the beach. (A bunch of unexploded artillery shells due to use as a USMC artillery firing range prior to the passage of the Act would qualify as a public safety reason, for example). The Coastal Commission cannot, however, require a landowner to provide more access than was provided in 1976 without compensating them for that access. That’s the law — the Coastal Commission cannot simply take access rights away from landowners and grant them to the general public, they can only maintain existing access rights and must buy any additional access rights that the public wants.
So anyhow, this is the law in California — it basically freezes access at 1976 levels, and requires the State to pay if it wants to require a landowner to provide more access than at 1976, and basically prohibits a landowner from taking away access that existed in 1976. In 1976, Martins Beach was open to the public. They could walk down the Martins Beach Road from the pavement for free, or they could pay a gate-keeper a small sum of money to drive down Martins Beach Road and park at a parking lot near the beach. When Vinod Khosla bought the land surrounding Martins Beach in 2008, he was warned that he had to maintain this access at the same level as 1976. He did so for two years, then decided he didn’t want to view any of the little people anymore, and locked the gate and put armed guards to keep people out — despite the requirements of the Coastal Act.
So here we are in 2018. The California Legislature passed a law in 2014 reiterating that Martins Beach is public property and that the access rights grandfathered in 1976 continues to exist. The California Court of Appeals affirmed that law, and the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal because the law is pretty much cut and dried. Khosla continues to try to prevent access but is handicapped in that because the local Sheriff says he won’t respond to trespassing calls because the surfers who jump the gate and go down to the beach to surf have a legal right to do so. Khosla could probably hire beefy security guards to attack surfers, but the surfers aren’t exactly shrinking violets and the security guards would have to assault the surfers in order to prevent them from continuing down the right of way granted by the 1976 Act, at which point the surfers would defend themselves and beat the crap out of the security guards. Needless to say, security companies are not falling over themselves to have their security guards beat up and charged with assault on a public right-of-way.
So what’s a billionaire oligarch to do when all the courts in the state of California refuse to be bought by his billions? Well… Vinod the Vile knows what to do: Take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. He figures that the Supreme Court got bought by the election of 2016, so he can get his way there.
Will it work? We’ll see. On the other hand, the current status quo, where Vinod can’t call the sheriff to get people thrown out for trespassing and security companies are reluctant to get involved for fear of being charged with assault or having their guards beat up, means that whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides will be mostly irrelevant. Vinod the Vile will continue to have to watch the “little people” use “his” beach — and will continue to be able to do nothing at all about it.
– Badtux the Beach Penguin
Note: My personal experience with Vinod the Vile dates back to fourteen years ago, when he was the lead investor in our startup and decided to use the company as his personal playtoy to prove out some bizarre theories of his. I left in disgust after three years and the company folded shortly afterwards after he managed to asset-strip it for his own benefit, managing to get four times more money out of it than he invested in the first place by stealing the money from the other investors with bogus loans and other means. Don’t ever, EVER go to work for a company whose lead investor is Vinod the Vile, and don’t *ever* approach him for investment. He will rape you, clear and simple. That’s what he *does*.
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