Vinod Khosla asks for $30M for access to public beach
abc10.com
abc10.com
Khosla is wrong in this one and continues to be an example of tone deafness on access rights and how the Bay Area sees beach access as compared to Malibu, etc. (They have similar fights down there, but, well, the gentrification and blockage is more established).
In an ideal world, the tech world would boycotts Khosla and startups refuse to take a dime from him. That would knock some sense into him. But this is not an ideal world, and people will continue lining up outside his door, hat in hand. He knows money is king, and he has lots of it.
Fake garage doors. Fake "No Parking" signs. Fake red-painted curbs. Rent-a-cops with real guns.
And that's to keep the public away from existing public beach access points.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/17/us/billionaires-beach-malibu-p...
Not sure what the recent upheaval with the California Coastal Commission will mean down the road (though, they also aren't saints in any way).
The law on public beaches in California is clear. You can't privatize a beach by trying to obstruct people from getting to it.
Apparently not[0]:
> In a recent battle between tourists, fishermen, surfers, other members of the public, and venture capitalist billionaire Vinod Khosla, San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Gerald J. Buchwald invoked the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to deny public access to a portion of the California coastline. See, Friends of Martin's Beach v. Martin's Beach 1, LLC, San Mateo County Civil Case #CIV517634. Despite the California State Constitution's specific provision enabling members of the public to access the beach, Judge Buchwald ruled that the Treaty trumped the California Coastal Act because it predated it, and officially ended a century of access to Martins Beach in Half Moon Bay, CA.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Guadalupe_Hidalgo#Ad...
How is using the legal system "abusing" the legal system? He makes his arguments for his position, and the court rules, one hopes, according to the law.
The law should be a stable foundation on which society can rest. If the treaty in question does actually govern property rights, and the people who bought property relied on the fact that it does so, and has done so in previous cases (thus establishing precedent), then it is unfair and abusive to change the status quo out from under them arbitrarily by popular opinion. That's not justice, that's tyranny by the majority.
until there is a grandfathering provision, wouldn't be the point of new Constitution is to establish new rules which override the old ones?
>Judge Buchwald ruled that the Treaty trumped the California Coastal Act because it predated it
The Supremacy clause states that a treaty made by the United States takes precedence over the constitution of any individual state.
The attitude about California's ground water is, "Hey, they own the water based on the laws on the books, what can you do?" Much of the public would rather they not use all that water on almonds and alfalfa and whatnot, just to export elsewhere. Why can't the rest of the country grow that stuff? How can someone exclusively own the groundwater like that??
Whatever law that applies to Vinod Khosla should apply to those large water-wasting water-owners.
(And it follows that however dastardly Vinod Khosla may seem, the large water-owners in California are irrevocably screwing over California's future generations' water resources, and are thus in my book, much more worthy of scorn and "public trust doctrine" action.)
Yea... That's not how plants work. Plants have zones that they grow in, and some are even more restrictive. Where I live, even if I grew cherry and apple trees, I would never get fruit off of them because it's too hot here.
I like the way you're thinking though. As an avid gardener, I just had to dig against this one a little.
(Ex: apples can grow in Appalachia, but they're famous in Washington state; potatoes may not grow well in Florida, and oranges wouldn't grow well at all in Idaho...) But almonds must grow in at least one other place where there is more water than in California's Central Valley.
So I think we're on the same wavelength.
And I remember hearing 10 years ago that water will be the new resource that people fight over, if oil was the resource that people fought over for the last half-century. And that agriculture trade would be a form of trading water. That's sort of already happening. Call me naive, but we should cut down on California's production of some crops, and use good Midwest farmland more efficiently by growing more non-meat agriculture instead of meat.
If not, then I imagine there's just a road going through his property. I tend to think of the streets as being publicly owned: The city should consider paving an alternate access route to the beach and paying for its maintenance out of the local property taxes.
That said, it's common for cities to have codes governing parking and such, and it's plausible to me that guaranteeing access to a beach is along the same lines. It seems weird to force him to maintain the road though.
This is like the endless use of maximum sentences in headlines: "hacker faces 100 years in prison!"... when they almost always end up getting <10yrs at the end of the trial. Sad to see HN fall into this trap once again.
Whether he's wrong in demanding compensation is a fair debate, don't get me wrong, but I don't think he expects to get anywhere near that price.
For instance, my friend(native there) had this phone from AT&T, a stock android phone (or so I assumed) but you cannot share internet on it! Or that the govt rarely builds any usable public transport is just crazy...(car companies have strong lobby may be ?) Store do not keep smaller sizes of anything (soaps, shampoos, food items) and force everybody to buy large.
Was their substance to that, or just an attempt to drag out the process?
I make it a point when I'm in Malibu to stomp across several of those "private" beaches, on foot. It takes a while to get to some of them, since access routes are rare. I suspect city planners are sympathetic to the goals of the privateers...there's a few places where it is a few miles between public access.
Hopefully, Half Moon Bay is less amenable to rich people skirting the law.
Also, I never knew Khosla was such a dick.
You know you are getting old when you say there should be blog/site for that instead of saying there should be an app for that.
The app: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/us/in-battle-over-malibu-b...
The earlier website (2007): http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2007/08/summer_beachcraft.p...
I haven't been to Malibu in a few years so mapping is not an option; I'd need to walk/bike around again to know where the "private" beaches are. But, pretty much if you walk in either direction on the beaches in Malibu, you'll find examples of it...some are more difficult than others.
I feel particularly strongly about protecting the commons, like parks and beaches and waterways, and Malibu rubbed me all kinds of wrong ways, in being such a "playground of the rich" while excluding everyone else. Despite it being illegal, the entire local government seems complicit in the heist of public resources.
All illegal.