Up Against a Seawall, Surfrider Wins Big

According to Jim Jaffee, the Solana Beach ruling could have a significant impact in several other places. These include Surfers Point and the California Street area in Ventura. This area has been starved of sand since the Matilja dam was constructed decades ago. Should Ventura be restricted from armoring its shoreline, the push to tear down the now completely silted up Matilja might strongly increase.

Various Views of Pleasure Point. Thanks to Surfrider.

There is also an effort to armor much of the length of Cliff Drive in the Pleasure Point area of Santa Cruz. In some parts of this legendary stretch of pointbreak, the ocean is badly eating away at the base of the cliffs. Now planners would have to look at how to get more sand to Santa Cruz, through either pumping or somehow getting more of into area rivers -- or they'll just put up more seawalls.

In Pacifica, which has huge problems with bluff erosion, the ruling could speed up efforts to simply get homes off the bluffs. In some parts of Pacifica, homes have simply been condemned, in others, the shores have been armored -- particularly with rip-rap boulders. Interestingly, in Pacifica, in some areas, if armor is built, then homeowners have to buy other land, and set it aside as a park. Why would Pacifica do this? Because in a very real sense, shoreline armoring represents a "taking" of a public property. You dump rocks along the shore, that reduces or eliminates the beach.

Pacifica Coastal Erosion.

And that is what's at the heart of this issue. Public versus private property. It's a thorny debate that California, with 86 percent of its shoreline actively eroding, will increasingly have to deal with.

What will this ruling mean for Solana and even nearby Encinitas in the near term? According to Jim Jaffee, it means that the city will actually have to take a look at ideas like "managed retreat" and getting more sand onto the beach through pumping or getting more into rivers where it can flow downstream. "Now we think they're going to have to study alternatives and mitigation measures a little bit harder," says Jaffee, "rather than just building walls along the beaches."

According to Surfrider's Chad Nelson, Surfrider is working with a number of other state agencies to come up with California's first comprehensive beach plan in 23 years. The plan will look at seawalls and other negative threats to the beach, and try to find large scale ways to solve them, rather than through piecemeal, local approaches like seawalls. "We've got to move the process forward," says Nelson, "and solve these problems comprehensively, rather than one seawall at a time."

http://www.surfrider.org/seawall

http://www.surfridersantacruz.org/beachscape.htm