Victory! Court rules against the California Coastal Commission in San Luis Obispo
There are legal victories, and then there are legal victories—court rulings so decisive, so sharply written, that they can only be considered a judicial knockout.
Case in point: Al Hadian and Ralph Bookout’s New Year’s Eve victory against the California Coastal Commission.
The (brief) backstory
Al and Ralph sued the Commission in 2022 with Pacific Legal Foundation’s help. If you’re unfamiliar with the California Coastal Commission, consider yourself lucky: The powerful land use agency controls 1.5 million acres of land, blocks development arbitrarily, has punished Elon Musk for his political views, imposes multimillion-dollar fines, can delay projects for years, and wields its authority so recklessly that The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel once accused the Commission of “pull[ing] a Saddam.”
Al and Ralph never should have been in the Commission’s crosshairs. The two men have owned neighboring properties in San Luis Obispo County for over twenty years. Their properties aren’t developed—yet—but they’ve been hooked up to water service since 2001.
Here’s why that’s important: The County, worried about limited water supply, imposed a moratorium on new municipal water customers (effectively pausing all new development), but it included an exception for any landowners for whom the district had promised to provide water before the moratorium. Al and Ralph, paying for water service since 2001, qualify. When Al and Ralph applied for development permits, San Luis Obispo County granted them.
The problem? The California Coastal Commission swooped in, appealed the County’s decision to itself, and reversed the permit approvals. So Al and Ralph have been unable to build on their properties, even though the County said they could.
Let’s look at what the Superior Court for the County of San Luis Obispo thought about that.
‘Simply wrong’
The opening paragraph of the court’s ruling in Hadian v. California Coastal Commission—authored by Judge Michael C. Kelley—is a thing of beauty:
Ralph Waldo Emerson chided rigid thinkers with his oft-quoted aphorism that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But consistency can have its virtues and one place where its salutary attributes are most important (and particularly deserving of judicial protection) is in the interpretation of our laws by administrative agencies.
The California Coastal Commission acted “in derogation of the legal/regulatory history of these parcels,” Judge Kelley continues. (Derogation is an excellent word; everyone should use it more.) The reversal of Al and Ralph’s permit approvals was “based on a misinterpretation of the governing legal provisions” of the County’s Local Coastal Program (LCP).
The California Coastal Commission had argued that its interpretation of the LCP was entitled to deference—that the court should simply defer to what the Commission says it’s authorized to do. Not so: “As a threshold matter, the Court rejects as unfounded the Commission’s contention that its construction of the LCP is entitled to deference,” Judge Kelley writes.
After going through the facts of the case—and noting that ten lots in Al and Ralph’s subdivision were previously developed with residences “without objection from the Commission”—Judge Kelley writes that the Commission’s actions in this case were “infected by fundamental legal error in the Commission’s interpretation of the County’s LCP.”
He continues:
As noted, the Commission contends the Court should defer to its interpretation of the LCP, but the authorities it relies upon do not apply in a situation such as this, where the Commission’s interpretation conflicts with the County’s interpretation of its own LCP, and where the County’s interpretation is more consistent with the language and the practical construction given to that language over the years, including evidence that the Commission has historically agreed with the County’s interpretation.
He also says the Commission’s interpretation of the County’s Public Works policy is “simply wrong,” and that the way the Commission paraphrases the policy in its brief is “a misleading characterization.” Drilling into what the policy actually says, Judge Kelley notes that its language “strongly weighs against the Commission’s interpretation because it would lead to absurd results.”
The entire ruling is worth reading. For more on the California Coastal Commission, you can also read about our upcoming argument at the California Supreme Court in Shear Development.
