The city’s AB1740 effort stopped being about bicycle lanes and parking near the beach the moment residents read the bill and understood what it actually did.

For years, Santa Monica has operated under a specific condition: the city never completed a document called a Local Coastal Program, a state-required planning framework that governs what can be built along the coast and how. Because it was never finished, an independent state agency, the California Coastal Commission, has retained the legal authority to review and approve development decisions in Santa Monica’s coastal zone. The city has had to answer to that agency before it could act.

AB1740 would change that. The bill, co-sponsored by the City of Santa Monica and Assemblymember Rick Zbur, along with allies such as Streets for All and Abundant Housing LA, would remove the state’s independent coastal watchdog from its oversight role and hand that authority to the city itself. Santa Monica would become the judge of its own coastal development decisions, including impact to sensitive resources, parking, access, and development.

That is inherently good–cities should govern themselves. Local control, exercised transparently and with genuine public participation, is how democratic planning is supposed to work. The problem is that little about how this bill came about inspires confidence that those conditions will be met. The city pursued legislation that would expand its own authority without, in the earlier version of the bill, an obligation to complete a Local Coastal Plan (which requires public participation and approval by the Coastal Commission), and without first telling the people it represents. The city worked with a state legislator to strip the Coastal Commission of authority here, and move the bill through Sacramento while most residents were unaware it existed–that is the record. Whether Santa Monica will use coastal autonomy responsibly after strong public blowback is an open question soon to be answered, but how it pursued that autonomy is not.

The Coastal Commission exists because of what happened before it existed. California’s coastline was developed heavily and largely without public check through the mid-twentieth century. By 1972, voters passed a ballot initiative to stop it, followed in 1976 by the Coastal Act, making the Coastal Commission a permanent, independent check on coastal decisions. Its mandate was never to facilitate development. It was to protect the coast from exactly the pressures that municipalities, acting on local political interests, had historically failed to resist.

Critics of AB1740 argue that the bill uses a procedural technicality, Santa Monica’s own failure to complete its Local Coastal Program, as the justification for removing that check. Now, under a Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Coastal Commission last week, the city says it is finally ready to move forward on that plan. Which raises a question nobody in City Hall or Assemblymember Zbur’s office has answered plainly: if the city is now prepared to finish what it should have finished decades ago, and the Coastal Commission is prepared to work with it, what exactly is AB1740 still for?

The bill is in process, and not yet enacted. But its existence, and the city’s role in sponsoring it, is what crystallized the opposition. What residents began to ask was simple: how much of what the city (including its City Council members and staff) was pursuing under this bill was actually required by state law, and how much was the city’s own ambition, carried to Sacramento before anyone local was consulted. That distinction matters. Housing density mandates from the state are one thing, but a city co-sponsoring legislation to strip the Coastal Commission of authority and limit independent oversight of its own coastline –including development–is another.

Councilmember Dan Hall was already in Sacramento representing the city’s position before public comment was opened at home, contradicting the longstanding notion that residents are genuine participants in decisions about neighborhood scale and coastal character.

For decades, planning was slow, contentious, and intensely local. The process was the politics. What residents see now is different. The substantive direction was set before the public was invited to weigh in. Opposition gets characterized as nostalgia or obstructionism, which forecloses the possibility that some of it is a legitimate civic disagreement about process and accountability. The consequence is the erosion of resident standing in decisions about their own city at the hands of its own representatives.

The bill has been extensively–even radically–amended since it first drew loud public opposition, but critics say the core problem remains. The Coastal Commission’s independent oversight role, the check that residents of every California coastal community depend on to protect the coast, is still what the bill targets.

Opposition has come from across Santa Monica’s civic life. The Santa Monica Democratic Club voted against the bill, Santa Monica for Renters Rights opposes it, the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City opposes it. These are not fringe voices; they represent a broad cross-section of residents who arrived at the same conclusion through different roads, as has the Coastal Commission itself. Assemblymember Zbur and his allies in Sacramento and at Santa Monica City Hall have pressed forward regardless. The bill passed the State Assembly last week, and it now awaits a vote in the State Senate. What it would accomplish, given the newly signed agreement with the Coastal Commission (other than a precedent to be used by other cities), is a question no one backing the bill has yet answered.

Every city changes. The question Santa Monica cannot seem to answer is whether residents still have a meaningful role in directing that change, or whether public process has become a formality, a requirement satisfied after the decisions are made. That question will outlast AB1740. If City Hall has an answer, residents have yet to see it.

Daniel Jansenson, Architect, for S.M.a.r.t.: Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow.

Dan Jansenson, Architect (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly ARE-CRE; Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Phil Brock (SM Mayor, ret.); Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB; Heather Thomason, community organizer; Charles Andrews, columnist. journalist; Bruce Leddy, Human Services Commissioner and NOMA Co-Chair.

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