Published by the Point Reyes Light with photo by David Briggs
The California Coastal Commission will allow for the failing seawall used as a public walkway on Brighton Beach to be rebuilt by the owner, albeit much narrower. The commission added the condition to a coastal permit it approved last week, disregarding strong support from the local utility district and residents for the original proposal to rebuild the wall with a comparable width, considering it serves as the only entry point to the upcoast end of the beach on a high tide.
Commissioners were split over the issue, but in the end decided to shrink the wall from its current range of 10 to 17 feet to a standard eight feet. Katie Rice, the District Two supervisor in Marin with a seat on the commission, and Steve Padilla, the chair, attempted to persuade their colleagues to retain more width after listening to public testimony.
“We’re taking away square footage on a structure that actually does provide access, and access to the beach is an important mandate under the Coastal Act,” Mr. Padilla implored at a hearing last Wednesday.
In a small concession, seven of the 12 commissioners added a provision for additional seating on the wall and expanded the width one foot beyond what commission staff had proposed. They had recommended a seven-foot width, which met the minimum width of six feet for emergency access as determined by Bolinas Fire Chief George Krakauer.
In their report to the commission, staff explained their reasoning for a narrower wall, making it clear that seawalls are, in their view, generally antithetical to natural resource preservation and even to public access. “As climate change causes the seas to rise ever faster, beach and recreational shoreline areas will be lost at an increasingly rapid pace,” they wrote. “If the inland area cannot also retreat, eventually there will be no available dry beach or shoreline area, and the shoreline will be fixed at the base of the armoring structure. In the case of an eroding shoreline, this represents the loss of a beach and shoreline recreational area as a direct result of the armoring.”
In most cases, that stance on coastal armoring would prevent the commission from permitting seawalls. However, the commission has different allowances for structures built before the 1972 Coastal Act. The Brighton residence was built in 1910, and the wall was most recently rebuilt around 1967, though there were previous iterations.
The coastal commission staff also concurred with the homeowner, tech entrepreneur Mark Pincus, that the seawall was necessary to protect the house. Staff agreed the wall could fail within two or three storm cycles due to heavy wave action.
The application to rebuild the wall was submitted around three years ago by Mr. Pincus’s company that owns the property, AMJT Capital, LLC, and the Bolinas Community Public Utility District was invited to join as a co-applicant last year, because it owns an adjacent parcel and sought to represent the public’s interest in the structure. The applicants proposed a similar but slightly narrower wall that ranged between seven and 16 feet. They hoped to replace the existing concrete with a steel sheet pile wall and tieback system that included several benefits besides structural integrity, including new stairways and wheelchair ramps. The project would be funded by AMJT Capital.
The owner and BCPUD, who have negotiated with commission staff for months over the project, expressed frustration over the terms approved at last Wednesday’s hearing. The width remained the largest concern, though they had other complaints, too.
Jack Siedman, BCPUD’s board president, explained that the difference in feet wasn’t going to make an impact as far as beach access: a high tide was going to flood the sand and push people up onto the wall regardless of how wide it was. The larger issue was the high use of the seawall, including by surfers, fishermen, locals and visitors alike.
“We took a strong position: Please don’t narrow the top of the wall,” Mr. Siedman said at the hearing. “We don’t believe that if you move the wall back a few feet and expose more sand on the beach that it really provides more beach access to the public. Because when a three-foot or four-foot tide comes in, whether the wall sticks out eight feet or six feet, that sand is going to be covered up with water anyway. So you haven’t really provided more beach to the public, but you have removed the top of the wall that is being used by the people.”
Dozens of Bolinas residents either spoke or submitted videos in support of BCPUD’s proposal, illustrating the importance of the seawall for beach access and recreation.
Aside from the width, the commission modified the permit in several other ways. Mr. Pincus must remove over 1,000 tons of rip rap at the base of the wall, in order to clear more beach. He accepted this term, saying it would not harm the integrity of a modernized wall.
There were several other conditions that he disputed. The commission ordered him to replace a perimeter fence on the landward side of the wall with landscaping. His lawyer, Steven Kaufmann, said removing the fence “would materially impair the usability of the homeowner’s outdoor living space with little or no public benefit and eliminate the clear visual and physical line of demarcation between the public walkway and [the] patio.”
Mr. Pincus also has to remove an existing storage shed and fence along Brighton Avenue, which is partially located on land owned by BCPUD. The district did not object to the shed and fence being there.
Lastly, the commission required that he remove a large wooden groin that sits on a neighbors property west of the seawall. “The groin is unrelated to the seawall project, the upcoast neighbor opposes its removal because it serves to slow beach erosion, and the public actively uses the groin for a variety of beach activities,” Mr. Kauffman wrote. Neither that provision, nor others, were removed from the permit during Wednesday’s hearing.
The utility district shared all of Mr. Pincus’s concerns and had several of their own, primarily pertaining to how the permit was worded in regard to ongoing legal and financial responsibility. The board said it would review the final permit this week; earlier this month, several board members indicated that they would prefer pulling out as co-applicants of the project over accepting the permit on the commission’s terms.
“If we let the coastal commission just push us around on this, it never stops,” Lyndon Comstock, a BCPUD board member, said at a July 7 meeting. “First of all, once they’ve done it, it’s never going back again. Once they’re set and we’ve agreed to these new rules, it’s never going to go back to something better than that. I don’t think that it’s acceptable, in terms of what the staff is offering.”
Mr. Pincus has 30 days to ask the commission to reconsider the terms and 60 days to file a lawsuit.
“We are confused by the decision and considering the best course of action,” Mr. Kauffman told the Light this week.