Getting Away From It All

Without advance notice or staff consultation, the California Coastal Commission has voted 9 to 3 to hold most of its future meetings in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Beginning in July, meetings would be rotated between those two cities except for a single session a year in San Diego and one in Eureka.

Thus the commission apparently has decided that it is not important to see much of the coast that it is supposed to manage and protect, or make itself accessible to the people who have an interest in coastal issues. The commission already has reduced the frequency of its sessions from twice a month to monthly for budget reasons.

Commission sources say that some of the newer members didn’t like the inconvenience of having to travel to such hard-to-reach places as Santa Cruz, Monterey, Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach. The move to limit meeting sites was orchestrated by Mark Nathanson, a Beverly Hills developer and investor, a Republican who was appointed to the commission recently by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. The action came at a meeting last week in Santa Cruz.

The practice of the commission has been to hold its meetings in a variety of coastal communities. When possible, it has attempted to match major decisions to the location. If there was a big Monterey issue coming up, the commission would try to schedule it for a meeting in Monterey, or at least nearby. That no longer would be possible.

The California coast is 1,100 miles long, roughly the distance from Portland, Me., to Jacksonville, Fla., or Amarillo, Tex., to Medicine Hat, Alberta. The commission has the responsibility of seeing the coastal areas that its decisions affect, and of making itself accessible to all coastal communities at least once in a while.

The commission will meet next in San Diego in May. That is when it should rescind its decision.