Leading the CA Coastal Commission for 25 Years, a Crusader and Lightning Rod
Katherine Ellison
The New York Times
05/09/2010
Peter Douglas has survived Nazi Germany, throat cancer, accidentally setting himself on fire, and what he counts as 11 efforts to unseat him in his quarter-century as executive director of the California Coastal Commission.
Peter Douglas, in his office as executive director of the California Coastal Commission, is committed to keeping the coastline in its natural state.
The question now is whether both Mr. Douglas, 67, and the 12-member commission can weather the state’s next budget and continue enforcing the 1976 Coastal Act, whose work has helped keep one of the world’s most beautiful coastlines largely undeveloped.
Mr. Douglas said he was deeply concerned that an item in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget could limit the agency’s access to legal services supplied by the attorney general, calling the plan “the greatest threat to the integrity of the Coastal Act since it was passed.”
The commission, based in San Francisco, is one of the nation’s most powerful — and litigious — land-use authorities.
Yet even some critics say its budget has perennially been inadequate to fulfill its broad mandate: to protect 1.5 million acres along 1,100 miles of coastline. In recent years, the commission’s enforcement backlog has grown to 1,500 cases, a situation that Mr. Douglas and his staff attribute to insufficient personnel. The staff numbers about 125 today, down from a high of 212 in 1980.
“Any day of the week, the offices look like there has just been an outbreak of anthrax,” said David Weinsoff, a public interest lawyer in the Bay Area.
Pending complaints include problems like blocked access to public beaches, illegally filled wetlands and the construction of homes, swimming pools and even golf courses without the required permits.
The new budget could effectively cap the commission’s annual legal expenses, which Mr. Douglas said could force him to choose between pursuing violators and making further budget cuts to underwrite legal action.
Moreover, he said, the commission for the first time would have to get the approval for new litigation from the governor’s Office of Finance, effectively giving politicians a “veto power” over its actions.
Linda Likar, an international sustainability consultant and former World Bank economist who has studied the commission, argued that the potential cut in legal support was “a pernicious way” to weaken the agency.
But Aaron McLear, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger, said the proposal was intended to apply to several other agencies, too, including the State Lands Commission.
And Norbert Dall, a land-use consultant in Sacramento who frequently works with the commission, said that while he thought the agency was “ridiculously underfunded,” he did not object to spending limits for what he characterized as unessential litigation.
The controversy is emblematic of Mr. Douglas’s long stint as executive director. While his many admirers depict him as an environmental hero, critics suggest that he needs to pick his battles.
“Few people in California have made as many enemies as Douglas,” The Capitol Weekly noted recently.
State Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny, a Democrat who is chairwoman of the budget committee, said of Mr. Douglas: “He often doesn’t choose to work with people. He just wants to tell you, which doesn’t make him a lot of friends.”
Mr. Douglas in many ways personifies the spirit of the early years of the grass-roots environmental movement that helped give birth to the Coastal Commission via a statewide voters’ referendum. With a graying beard and a bolo tie, he calls himself a “radical pagan heretic,” and he has been known to interrupt drives along the coast to stand in front of bulldozers operating without a permit.
His values reflect those embraced by his home county, Marin, including a reverence for natural landscapes and functioning farmland — and an antipathy toward development that might alter them.
His powers of endurance, both personal and professional, are legendary. Born in Berlin, he fled the Nazis with his family when he was a child. In 2006, two years after recovering from Stage 4 cancer, Mr. Douglas set a match to a pile of dead leaves he had doused with gasoline, setting off an explosion that sent him flying. He has recovered from the serious burns.
