VENTURA, Calif. — The California Coastal Commission was correct in trying to prohibit off-road vehicles in Oceano Dunes because it’s legally obligated to protect environmentally sensitive areas, even if that means contradicting the official name of the area, an attorney for the commission told a panel of appeal judges on Tuesday.
“What’s the name of the facility?” asked Second District Court of Appeal Associate Justice Kenneth R. Yegan at the court’s Ventura annex.
“It’s a state vehicle recreation area,” said William J. White of Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, the commission’s attorney.
“Doesn’t it mean that vehicles should be able to go there?” Yegan retorted.
Not quite, White said.
Yes, when Oceano Dunes became a California State Park in the 1970s, the state intended to let vehicles race around the sand dunes, but it didn’t give off-roaders a special exemption to trample on state laws and coastal planning policies, he said.
Those policies, White added, specifically make protection of environmentally sensitive areas of primary concern, even if it makes other legally mandated parts of the commission’s mission, like maintaining access to beaches for public use and recreation, subordinate to protecting the dunes and endangered species that live in it — like the fragile and threatened Western Snowy Plover bird — from off-roading vehicles.
In 2021, the commission — the state agency tasked with protecting the California coastline and ensuring everyone has access to it — unanimously voted to prohibit off-roading, also called off-highway, vehicle use at Central California’s Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area by 2024, citing a local Indigenous group’s concerns that its land was being destroyed by off-roaders, air pollution, and other problems.
Friends of Oceano Dunes, a group that describes itself as “citizens and business representatives who enjoy the benefits of public access and usage of the Oceano Dunes State Vehicle Recreation Area,” sued the commission in San Luis Obispo Superior Court, claiming that the commission overstepped its jurisdiction.
In 2023, a judge agreed with the group and ruled that the commission improperly modified a coastal development permit held by California State Parks.
If the commission wanted to prohibit off-roaders, it should have worked with San Luis Obispo County to change its coastal planning policies, called local coastal programs, the judge ruled. Oceano Dunes local coastal program specifically allows off-roading in the dunes in specific areas, they added.
The commission appealed the ruling in 2023.
“This is a very unique permit,” White said. “It was a way to actually allow OHV use to the extent that it might not harm ESHA,” he added, using abbreviations for “off-highway vehicle” and “environmentally sensitive habitat area.”
The permit included a provision known as adaptive management, where the area is monitored and studied and policies are adapted to meet the changing requirements to best protect the environment.
“They got 40 years of OHV use out of it, but what the commission is saying is we now have the evidence to show that any amount of driving around — and one OHV can drive miles and miles in one day — and what the commission found is, even on this so-called barren sand areas, that those provide an essential function to this dune complex, and when you drive over them, you destroy the very delicate crust that is critical to allowing these areas to revegetate and to get established, and it also causes a lot of erosion to the dunes,” he added.
But Thomas Roth of Law Offices of Thomas D Roth, Friends of Oceano Dunes’ attorney, argued that if there was such a dire need to protect the dunes, then the commission should have gone through the correct process, including working with the county, to change the permit and regulations.
“The Coastal Commission did not, in good faith, try to resolve this. They decided that they were king,” Roth said.
David Hubbard of Gatzke, Dillon and Ballance LLP — an attorney for Ecological Partners Inc., a plaintiff with Friends of Oceano Dunes — added that the area was designated a state park for off-roading a couple of years before the California Coastal Act was passed in 1976, which is the law that created the commission and the requirement that municipalities create local coastal programs.
During the development of the local coastal program, which the commission had to approve, there were no objections to allowing off-roading, he said.
“Yeah, but are decisions frozen in time? Over a period of time, things change. 1984 was a while ago,” asked Presiding Justice Arthur Gilbert.
That’s true, Hubbard replied, but the commission made a unilateral decision to close the area off — a decision that only the county could make, he added.
The Coastal Act only regulates new developments, he added, so if state parks wanted to create more areas for off-roading, then the commission could jump in to regulate it.
There is no way to interpret the local coastal program’s provisions in a way that allows harm to the environment to continue if there’s new evidence that it’s being harmed, White said. There is new evidence that it is being harmed, he added.
“It is not a new policy. The policy hasn’t changed. It’s always been adaptive management,” White said.
The judges took the parties’ arguments under submission.
Associate Justice Hernaldo J. Baltodano rounded out the panel of judges.