California Sues Vinod Khosla over Martins Beach Public Access

Edit: here's a timeline: https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-beach

If you land lock a beach, in practice (like in the example above) there is an access route used by public which you are NOT entitled to close.

The public can do what it wants on the part of the beach up to the high tide line. It doesn't extend to the whole of what you'd think of as the "beach."

And California basically already seized an easement on his land years ago when they passed the law requiring beach access (although I'm not 100% sure how that's structured legally).

He might have a point about needing to maintain a relatively safe path, but so does every property owner in Malibu and they all seem to have it figured out.

I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that he should provide access through the road to the parking lot, and just disallow parking, but it doesn't seem obvious to me. The previous owner did not allow free access (there was a gate), so I think it is OK for the new owner to forbid access entirely.

Does he need to maintain those facilities? Could he just unblock access and move on? This feels like a cheap excuse.

TBH, the beach is small enough and there is so little capacity for traffic to it that I don't see how it could ever be "profitable" as a cash generator for anyone.

It's a beach. Why does it have to be profitable?

> should CA be footing that bill?

You mean for cleanup and maintenance?

Sure, why not? If Californians what their beaches, then their tax dollars should be taking care of them.

> Could they sublease the property to an entrepreneur that thinks they could make the beachside facilities profitable?

with

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tr...

His realtors knew 100% about the passage used by public which ran through the property.

That would require a very creative reading of the constitution. Congress could pass a law overriding it, and SCOTUS could could uphold that law under the commerce clause (land value in California affects land value in Oregon etc...).

The reasoning is that it wasn't public access, but rather a private business operating on the land. A restaurant, while "Open to the public" is not the same as a truly "public" space (like a state-owned road, or a national park).

It is absolutely infuriating that a rich individual can get the type of "justice" that the rest of us can never hope to achieve, in the legal system. Or as Peter Thiel put it when he bankrupted Gawker: "If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system."

Unfortunately, this suit is unlikely to make any difference in the above, and it doesn't seem like anyone cares about fixing the above problem. Maybe I'm just being a fundamentalist who's blowing it out of proportion. But my sense of fairness is constantly outraged by how ridiculously hard it is for any layperson to get justice in today's legal system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

As twisted as this logic may be, I guess it is plausible some egotistical old guy would think this way.

Edit: This is the quote:

"The “beach issue,” as it is called internally at Khosla Ventures, has surprisingly not been a problem in the office. “It’s an incredible negotiating tool for me,” said Samir Kaul, another partner at Khosla Ventures.

When a company was trying to “screw” the firm, Mr. Kaul brought up news articles about the beach at a meeting. “I said: ‘My boss is going to the Supreme Court for a beach he’s never gone to. We’re not posturing here. This guy’s not going to settle,’” Mr. Kaul said. “And then I just sat there."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/technology/vinod-khosla-b...

> Khosla, in legal filings, said he “was willing to give the business a go, and continued to allow members of the public to access the property upon payment of a fee. But [he] soon faced the same problem the Deeneys had faced: The business was operating at a considerable loss, as the costs of keeping the beach, the parking lot and other facilities in operable and safe condition significantly exceeded the fees the business generated.”

It's important to understand that this dispute involves two separate tracks of issues, one where Khosla has been winning, and one where he has been losing.

The first issue is the property right. An ancient doctrine called the "public trust" doctrine holds that the waters and beaches up to the high tide line belongs to the public. Moreover, it holds that, generally, there is an easement across private land to access that area.

However, California is a johnny-come-lately state. As a result, under Supreme Court precedent (Summa Corp. v. California), the state doesn't have easements over certain private property that dates to Mexican land grants: https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art... (p. 429-430). Based on that precedent, the California Court of Appeals has held that there is no easement (as a matter of public trust doctrine) over Khosla's property:

> While the public trust doctrine can protect access rights over private land, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to extend that protection to private land certified under the 1851 federal law implementing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where the federal or state government had not asserted an interest in title proceeding. Therefore, the court of appeal in Friends I found that, because the Martin’s Beach property had been certified under the 1851 law without any mention of a public interest and never passed into state ownership, there could be no common law public trust easement over the land to the water.

There was a subsequent suit based on an alternate theory: that although there was no common law easement, an easement arose because the previous property owner "dedicated" the road to public use. The California Court of Appeals rejected that t heory too. https://www.jurist.org/news/2019/11/ca-appellate-court-rules....

> As such, according to the common law of public dedication, the court determined that Martin’s Beach is not dedicated to public access.

Opinion here: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF

So now we are on the third string legal theory (from the article):

> State officials have been following these cases closely and are now taking a swing at the fight. The new lawsuit asks the court to consider unexamined evidence that shows that the beach, as well as the gated road, have been historically used by the public — citing a common law doctrine known as “implied dedication.”

We've gone from an easement under property law, to a "public dedication," to "implied public dedication."

That brings us to the second legal issue, which is whether Khosla needs a permit to build a structure to close the road to the beach. Even though courts have repeatedly held that there is no public right to use the road, the California Coastal Commission has found that it can use its powers to control development on the coast to keep Khosla from actually vindicating his private property right. So far, the State has been successful on that front. But after last year's loss on the underlying property rights issue, that position gets harder to justify. The State can only go so long using its authority over the building of fences to keep open a public easement that courts have repeatedly held does not exist. Hence this lawsuit.

As to your point (B)--it's a wonderful thing that private citizens have the financial resources to fight the State and vindicate their legitimate property rights. The opposite of that is tyranny.

I just don't quibble over minutia like that. I don't get people who do. This seems like a gigantic waste of time and resources where even if you win you lose.

Otherwise, if I own it, I should be able to keep others off of it. You don't actually own something that you cannot control access to.

If you disagree, then keep your front door unlocked, because I'm moving in with some friends later this week.

Rather than be infuriated, be comforted in the fact that in spite of all his money he has been unable to overturn this law. He has made a lot of lawyers rich doing it, and will have paid a chunk of San Mateo's superior court's budget this year in fees. And he still lost.

Now the state and coastal commission are getting a court order so that they can start fining him without the need to go to court. Think of it as a really really regressive tax on a rich land owner. Let's say he writes it off as the cost of doing business and just keeps paying fines. Well I could single handedly double the budget that the coastal commission has available for keeping beach access open. That's a lot of resources.

It is kind of odd that people continually frame this as a problem with an individual instead of a legal clarification of land use rights. The conflicts over access and who pays for services and liabilities such as trash accumulating have always been there but were allowed to fester as long as people sort of worked things out. Realistically that situation was never stable and was always heading for some kind of forced legal resolution no matter who was owning and who was surfing. Was public access allowed or not? In the past mostly locals would have known about the spot in the first place and anyone having problems with access would have walked away and maybe tried again later. The longstanding tension does not represent full fair access.

Once he got money - he revealed his true self

Of course, Khosla should have access to the lands he owns. Under California law, land is something that private citizens can own. A beach is not one of those things.

EDIT: that being said, private property rights do not always or even typically grant you exclusivity. Many jurisdictions have various requirements on what private landowners must allow the public to do on their land. For example, many jurisdictions have freedom to roam provisions, which ensure that the public has access to wilderness, even if privately owned. The United States does not have this in general, but it is certainly within the purview of the states to legislate such things. In many US cities, homeowners own the sidewalk and must maintain it, but allow the public access. This is written in the deed, or mandated by statue.

And now somehow he has people on the internet arguing that a billionaire should be allowed exclusive benefit to public land- as if of all people, the billionaire is the one that needs the public handout.

No one is allowed to own a beach in California. This isn't about mob rule, this is about a choice Californians made many years ago that says beaches are public.

The beach is not his.

He has no right to do what he is doing but the only reason we are talking about it at all is because he is rich.

Fair point, but...

> On the other hand if his purchase did not include exclusivity to the beach then by all means go there and piss around.

This, by law, does not exist in any form in California (unless the beach is on a lake rather than the ocean).

This is simply a case of someone flaunting the law.

My front lawn can be eminent domained to build new power lines, so clearly the state has greater authority over property than your argument represents.

That's not the issue. If you own property that's completely encircled by other properties, you're entitled to an easement through a neighboring property. Conversely, if you own a parcel of land that participates in the blockade of another parcel, you very well might be required to let the owners of that other parcel to walk on your lawn to get to their property. You'll probably want to maintain a walkway, because if their daily use turns your lawn to mud, you'll probably be liable for any injuries they sustain.

https://patch.com/california/napavalley/4-types-easements