Pacifica’s coast contending with climate change

“Pacifica has not put that into any kind of text in their proposed plan. They’re not yet kind of approaching it that way. I wouldn’t use that in reference to this process at all,” Stephanie Rexing, Coastal Commission North Central district manager, said, noting that commission staff would be supportive if the city chose to.

Rather than moving forward with an explicit managed retreat strategy, the city and its planning department are attempting to broker a compromise.

This is due in large part to the Coastal Commission’s policy that development should not rely on shoreline protections like “armoring” — a term used to describe any physical structure designed to protect the shore, like a seawall — can feel untenable to residents.

“Pacifica is trying to grapple with the fact that there’s a lot of development right up to that line throughout their entire city, and much of it is also armored, and so they’re just trying to strike a balance of protecting what they’ve got,” Rexing said. “We want to minimize armoring to the extent that we can and when and if things are redeveloped anew we ask that they be designed to be safe. … So that’s the rub.”

Future armoring decisions are mostly under the jurisdiction of the Coastal Commission, but dealing with property currently protected by armoring — particularly structures constructed after the Coastal Act went into effect, as property built up before is exempted — has become a complicated matter that the land use plan aims to address.

This issue is the crux of the matter for property owners within Coastal Commission jurisdiction who would no longer be able to redevelop homes or commercial property as is. Instead, redevelopment — whether to maintain their property or repair damage — would often not be allowed if the building was in a “hazard vulnerability” area, even if protected by a seawall.

“It’s that fiction and that fallacy that you have to treat the wall like it’s not there,” Pacifica Planning Director Christian Murdock said. “Why are we imposing this alternative reality that the Coastal Commission, in the past, has been insisting on? The community was not willing to accept that.”

At a full house of community members at a roundtable discussion in December, Murdock presented Pacifica’s solution to this previously “one-size-fits-all” approach: designated “special resiliency areas” at Rockaway Beach and West Sharp Park, where shoreline protection already exists and the most restrictive land use policies would theoretically not apply.

“These policies would allow the city and the Coastal Commission, through the land use plan, to recognize development that’s existing behind seawalls and allow it to develop in a more traditional way,” he said.

Limitations of development

The Coastal Commission and the city are still deciding the limitations of development in these areas. The type of substantial structural modification that could trigger a setback requirement, for example, is currently a redesign that modifies more than 50% of the property.

Murdock emphasized that a land use plan, despite requiring Coastal Commission certification, also cannot move forward without city approval.

But at that December meeting, residents still expressed major concerns — some about the cost of complying with Coastal Commission regulation, others about the relatively late proposal of the special resilience areas, and others still worried about the relatively convoluted nature of the definitions included in the more than 60-page document.

“Our wordsmithing is really good. … What we need is clarity,” Cliff Lawrence said at the meeting. “We need to be able to explain this to somebody who doesn’t have a college degree, who can understand how it is gonna personally impact them, [and] be able to answer their questions.”

And Pacifica residents are concerned about their right to defend their property from encroaching tides and erosion, including worry about a clause in the land use plan document that would maintain future shoreline protection like a seawall is not guaranteed for residents, residents said during the meeting.

The planning process has been ongoing for over 10 years already, Murdock said, and does not include the second stage of Pacifica’s overall Coastal Program, the implementation program.

The division over ‘managed retreat’

At a Jan. 25 presentation hosted by the Pacifica Environmental Family, Dr. Charles Lester — the director of Ocean and Coastal Policy at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute — discussed the history of the California Coastal Commission, originally put in place by California voters.

He also pointed to the negative ramifications of armoring in general. The man-made structures are expensive, challenging to maintain, and eventually destroy or hurt beaches.

“What happens to beaches when you build seawalls? Eventually the beach is going to disappear,” Lester said.

During the presentation and subsequent Q&A, he also addressed the concept of managed retreat, which is a sea-level rise and erosion tactic in which communities pull back and relocate from the coastal edge over time. He cited the college community of Isla Vista, adjacent to UCSB, as one example — houses perched on the cliff edge will require “systematic removal of the seaward sides of buildings as they become endangered.”

“It’s not something that happens tomorrow, we’re not asking people to move tomorrow, we’re trying to implement programs over long periods of time to facilitate the adaptation of a community,” Lester said.

The term managed retreat is inherently divisive in Pacifica, Murdock said.

“Managed retreat is a loaded term,” he said. “It’s helpful to contrast it with the alternative, unmanaged retreat — dealing with it as they come.”

Although the connotation of the term can imply individuals forced to vacate their properties, Murdock said, in reality the consequences of such a policy would more likely be individuals choosing to disinvest in their property after the city can no longer maintain services like sewer lines in the area.

Despite ongoing concern from the public, both the Coastal Commission and city representatives said that they’re committed to finding compromise and a way through the complicated coastal land use plan process. While the agencies have previously been at an impasse, Murdock said he believes the Coastal Commission has become more understanding of Pacifica’s needs over time.

“I think there’s a lot of people that are trying to structure this as an ‘us versus them.’ I wanna be clear that’s not how I view it,” he said. “We both have priorities and objectives. The coastal commission, especially as of late, has really demonstrated they share a common interest with us to getting this process completed.”

“We’re just kind of trying to make this work, essentially,” Rexing said.

The next community meeting held by the city will be March 2. Pacifica Environmental Family will host another educational talk March 3.