Allow sea walls with sand replenishment
Solana Beach has a decision to make that will resound up and down the California coast. What should it do about shoreline erosion?
It can let the shoreline bluffs continue to erode and the bluff-top homes stand for a given number of years or until bluff erosion topples them, whichever comes first. That is, in essence, a policy of "planned" or "managed" retreat.
Or it can keep the bluffs from further eroding and the bluff-top houses intact by a privately financed expansion of sea walls along this stretch of coast and, through a federal sand replenishment and retention project, widen its narrowing beaches.
The second option is preferable - legally, financially and scientifically.
Adopting a policy of planned retreat raises serious legal issues. For starters, the state's Coastal Act provides that sea walls and other coastal protection structures "shall be permitted when required to serve coastal-dependent uses or to protect existing structures or public beaches in danger from erosion and when designed to eliminate or mitigate adverse impacts on local shoreline sand supply."
The bluff-top homes are existing structures. Sea walls and other armoring devices do not deplete the sand supply; inland urban development does that. Armoring the coast, say coastal engineers, doesn't narrow the beaches. And removing the armor won't widen them.
Scientific research shows that eroding bluffs contribute only minutely to the local shoreline sand supply; and the little sand that bluff erosion does add, wave action washes away. With it goes some environmentalists' specious argument that the sand which falls from a bluff or lies behind the sea wall is or would become "the public beach" which private sea walls "steal."
On the contrary, further armoring the bluffs now would have a long-term mitigating effect on erosion of public infrastructure and coffers by providing an added buffer between the sea and coastal roadways, railroad tracks and utilities. Sea walls, moreover, enhance public safety on the beach: Falling bluffs have killed people, and the city can be held liable.
Planned retreat raises also a constitutional issue: public compensation to owners of private property taken for a public purpose. The inevitable subsequent lawsuits by the property owners over whether planned retreat constitutes a taking, and what the compensation, if any, should be, make planned retreat an expensive proposition. And if the courts, as they have in the past, rule it to be a taking due compensation, add that hundreds of millions in recompense to the taxpayers' bill.
With planned retreat, add in as well the multimillions of federal dollars forgone because the Army Corps of Engineers will drop its project for sand replenishment and retention devices sufficient for a beach at least 200 feet wide over the next 50 years. In the corps' calculations, the cost of compensating homeowners means the costs of the project outweigh its benefits. That prospect would become real the day the City Council adopted a policy of planned retreat.
No beach, no bluffs, no bluff-top homes, lots of litigation: Why pursue those fruits of planned retreat when a city can have its beaches made wider and safer for recreation and tourism, and its bluffs, and its bluff-top homes and their considerable property taxes? Solana Bluff homeowners further sweeten the pot by requesting designation of their neighborhood as a Geologic Hazard Abatement Area to allow them to raise funds for their sea walls privately.
If the council rejects planned retreat, environmental groups have promised to sue. Let them. The science doesn't support their perspective, and the law shouldn't. The issue of coastal management reaches far beyond Solana Bluffs, and other groups will help in a court fight to preserve common sense, property rights and an environment in which humankind, too, is a natural resource.
Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. |
