Why Trump’s attempt to blackmail California on LA fire relief funding is a betrayal | Opinion
One of California’s great treasures is its 840-mile-long coastline.
From the redwood-forested coast of Northern California to the rocky shores of Big Sur on the Central Coast to the sandy beaches in Southern California, the California coast is truly a wonder. Central Valley residents know this as the coast is a prime destination for many when blazing hot summer months arrive.
Preserving and guarding the splendor is the California Coastal Commission, the public agency that the state’s voters created in 1972. Its mission is “to protect, conserve, restore, and enhance the environment of the California coastline.”
The commission frequently denies developers who want to build on the coast and private homeowners who wrongly believe the beach below their homes belongs to them. It doesn’t. It belongs to the public, as enshrined in the California Coastal Act of 1976.
It is no surprise, then, that a critic of the Coastal Commission would be none other than President Donald Trump, aka a New York real estate developer. One can imagine Trump wanting to cover the California coast with hotels and Coney Island-like amusements. The profits from such would flow to him, naturally.
Now comes a threat by Trump to use his office to withhold any federal funding from the Coastal Commission simply because he doesn’t like how it operates.
Even worse, Trump’s position was revealed by Ric Grenell, a presidential envoy, when discussing how the president would put conditions on any relief funds for Los Angeles wildfire recovery.
“I think the reality is that the federal response is mostly money, and so we are going to have strings on the money that we give to California,” Grenell said, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. “We’re talking about those conditions now.”
Grenell made his comments at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, D.C. “Everyone who’s involved knows that the California Coastal Commission is a disaster,” he said, “and it needs to absolutely be defunded ... It’s an unelected group of people who are crazy woke left. One person can stop progress. And they’ve made California less safe.
“I think squeezing their federal funds, making sure they don’t get funds, putting strings on them to get rid of the California Coastal Commission, is going to make California better.”
Grenell could not be more wrong.
Coastal Commission can be difficult
The Coastal Commission can be hard to deal with and it sometimes goes too far. Judges have determined it does. However, the state’s voters wanted it to have final land-use authority in the coastal zone because too many landowners were limiting public access to state beaches.
The commission is a wall of resistance preventing wealthy people from turning public beaches into private enclaves. For decades the commission has been in a legal tussle with residents of Hollister Ranch who don’t want public access across their isolated property north of Santa Barbara.
Another long-running dispute centers on Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla. He has tried blocking access to a popular surfing spot on Martins Beach in San Mateo County because a road to access the beach cuts through his 90-acre property. The Coastal Commission joined the State Lands Commission in 2020 to sue Khosla, a billionaire. In September, a San Mateo County Judge rejected Khosla’s attempt to have the Coastal Commission lawsuit thrown out of court. Khosla has spent more than a decade trying to get his way.
“This case goes to the heart of California’s public access mandate,” said former Coastal Commission Chair Steve Padilla at the time, “We cannot allow this to be chipped away each time someone purchases beachfront property — it’s a dangerous precedent for the future of public access in California.”
More recently, the commission has opposed increasing rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base for Elon Musk’s commercial communications satellites, because no new environmental review has been done.
It is no wonder that Musk would seek to limit the commission, and now that he has the ear of the president, Trump’s disdain for the commission has surfaced.
Trump made a lot of promises to voters that he was on their side, would bring down inflation, and create jobs. But how do populist campaign promises square with conditioning aid to Californians who lost their homes to wildfires on weakening or eliminating a Coastal Commission dedicated to preserving public beaches for public use?
How is championing the people accomplished by letting a billionaire erect fences around beaches used by everyday people because said billionaire wants a beach all to himself?
Wildfire aid needed
There must be no political litmus test to gain federal disaster aid.
Trump and the Republican Congress need to provide the help that Gov. Gavin Newsom is seeking — $40 billion — and leave the Coastal Commission out of it.
California’s coastline belongs to everyone. Trump is free to visit, just like anyone else.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Why Trump’s attempt to blackmail California on LA fire relief funding is a betrayal | Opinion."