Khosla loses (again) bid to prevent public beach access
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
EDIT: wait a minute, this is the gate? http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/12/11/martins-beach-khosla-a...
One could have that whole thing in pieces in about ten minutes with a torch. There’s something I’m missing (like guards towers and German Shepherds), because I can’t be the only person on the West Coast thinking “oh, you just try and keep that gate standing; acetylene refills are cheap.”
Even if you are "in the right", as a normal citizen, it's kind of hard to take a beating -- physical or legal. Which, in both cases, also means financial -- against very deep pockets.
P.S. Kholsa's position is simple the modern, tech baron version of "might is right". Nothing new in that. Laws and rights have always been "for sale" to varying degrees.
Which is why some people support stronger public institutions, as a counter-measure to outsized private power.
P.P.S. And one of the essential tricks in THAT, is to keep those public institutions accountable.
At that point it's a legal public byway. Kind of how easements etc are.
He's allowed to have a gate, but he can't actually block access. He also knew this when he bought the place.
Of course hopping the gate isn’t illegal so...
Yet there's a near universal consensus that "the law" (i.e. the founding statutes regarding access to coastal properties, from the time California entered the Union) mandates that this access must be maintained, for perpetuity, by whoever takes title to the property.
So in effect there's a permanent easement attached to the property (even if the term as such didn't appear in the text of the original statues).
There are things we can do - if you are in SV, let this be known in your circles. If you are in CA - let your representative know that this is of concern to you
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin privilegium law for or against a private person, from privus private + leg-, lex law
So as long as he pays the fine, he gets his own law? I take it the fine doesn't have an exponential growth penalty.
He made a long convoluted argument that the property was part of a Mexican land grant that pre-dated the California law and thus was not covered. I gave it high marks for creativity, I half expected him to declare he was genetically part native american and he was going to claim the beach as part of his ancestral birthright.
He is running out of options though, the only one left that I can think of is that the law says you have to provide access but it doesn't have to be easy access. I could imagine some pretty complex access mechanisms.
So access already exists. It's the "easy" part they are fighting over.
The Constitutional issue is whether it's a taking to force Khosla to provide the level of access that the State wants. While it's clear that the State owns the land up to the mean high tide line, what it actually wants here is for Khosla to maintain the existing public access. That not only includes a pathway to the public shore, but access to the sandy beach, the existing provision of parking, etc. Khosla asserted the Constitutional issue, but the appellate court ruled that it was not yet ripe. In other words, Khosla can't argue there was a taking until the State actually denies his permit to close up the beach access. (The theory is that there is no reason to resolve a Constitutional question until we actually see what position the State takes.)
I think Khosla is actually right on the Constitutional point--if the State does make him keep the existing beach access (parking and all) that's a taking. That said, Khosla had full notice of what the State wanted before he bought the property. He basically tried to arbitrage on the fact that other potential buyers wouldn't engage in an extended legal battle with California to exercise the full extent of their private property rights. If he loses on that arbitrage bid, he'll have deserved it.
No, of course not. And that's the whole point that's been finally upheld by the Court.
Easements and rights-of-way that stay with the property are not new, not unusual, and not generally something you can get wiped out by stomping your feet and yelling that it's a taking.
And the specific case of property rights ending at a specific tide line, and public access being guaranteed, exists widely and non-controversially in US states which have tidal coasts, and even where not explicit via statute has precedent running back in the common law to pre-independence times and ultimately at least as far back as the laws of the Byzantine empire. Dude's not gonna get a judgment in his favor; his plan is pretty clearly to just keep locking it up, paying the fine, locking it up, paying the fine, until somebody buys the property from him, he runs out of money, or he dies of old age.
I'm curious as to how you stand behind both of these statements.
Being as the second clearly contradicts the first.
One could say it's because the guy's basically a nutjob of sorts. But that's be oversimplifying (if ever so slightly).
The more nuanced explanation is that -- like a lot of rich techies -- he apparently subscribes to an intellectual culture that believes that now matter what written laws say -- states and other governmental entities actually have limited legitimacy, and in effect are fundamentally subordinate to "common" or "natural" law. Specifically when it comes to the "rights" of owners of real property.
So just because the law says something -- something silly about a requirement to grant the unwashed public "access" to a plot of land that, after all, you bought and paid for -- as the land owner, you really don't need to pay any attention to it. Or if you want to be a big craftier, you can just say "I don't like this current jurisdiction's laws, and I'd prefer to respect the laws of its (for some 150+ years) vanquished predecessor instead."
So if people come after you in the courts -- hey, if you can afford lawyers sufficiently skilled so as to bamboozle either the justices in the jury with lofty-sounding talk about how, actually, the chain-of-title goes all the way back the land grants made by the Mexican Empire (and hence, you only have to worry about what its laws say about any requirements for public beach access) -- then more power to you.
Which is actually the route Khosla took in this case.
Edit: He's not fighting the state, he's fighting his neighbors. (I mean, technically he's fighting the state, but the people who really care about this are his neighbors that he's screwing.)
I was thinking about how Khosla is trying all these legal antics with the government, but the real people who he's most directly affecting are the folks who have been using that beach for years and years.
It's so unneighborly.