Supreme Court refuses

Supreme Court refuses to take up Martins Beach case. Surfers, beachgoers relieved

By Peter Fimrite

The U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday not to take the case of a California tech billionaire who challenged a lower court ruling preventing him from blocking access to a beach on his San Mateo County property, a move that advocates for public access touted as a victory for beachgoers across the country.

The decision means lawyers for Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, will not get the opportunity to argue that Khosla has a right to stop people from crossing his property to reach picturesque Martins Beach, about six miles south of Half Moon Bay.

The crescent-shaped cove, featuring a distinctive pyramid-shaped rock, has been the subject of an ugly almost decade-long clash between Khosla and surfers and other beachgoers that began when Khosla blocked the only road leading to Martins Beach. The Supreme Court’s rejection of the case now prevents the Martins Beach battle from becoming a test case for public coastal access around the country.

“It’s big time,” said Robert Caughlan, a 75-year-old San Mateo surfer known as “Bird Legs” who once served as president of the Surfrider Foundation, which filed suit against Khosla after he blocked the road. “Why is access to Martins Beach important? For the same reason access to Yosemite is important. Its a public treasure.”

Khosla’s decision to hire Paul Clement, a high-powered beltway lawyer, and appeal the case to the Supreme Court, has caused anxiety in the California Legislature and in legal circles that the court, which opened its new session Monday, will undo decades of law upholding public access to beaches.

Khosla claims the order requiring him to open his land to the public without just compensation is tantamount to stealing his property.

A ruling in favor of Khosla would have impacted impact as many as 22 states that have granted the public the right to access beaches, lakes and waterways, said Joe Cotchett, the lead attorney for Surfrider.

“The most conservative and divided Supreme Court in my lifetime confirmed that even a billionaire, who refuses to acknowledge that the law applies to him, and retains the most expensive attorneys he can find, cannot create a private beach,” Cotchett said. “Beaches are public in California, and the immensely wealthy must comply with the Coastal Act just like everyone else.”

If Khosla wins, he said, “it will start with waterways and then it will go to every lake and then, further, to every private park.”

The current proprietor of Khosla Ventures bought Martins Beach and the surrounding coastal lands for $32.5 million in 2008. He shut the public access gate in September 2010, citing the cost of maintenance and liability insurance.

Surfrider sued Khosla in 2013, arguing that the shoreline had been open to all comers since at least 1918 and belonged to the public. After a series of back-and-forth rulings, San Mateo County Judge Barbara Mallach ruled in 2014 that Khosla should have obtained a development permit from the California Coastal Commission before shutting the gates.

A state appeals court agreed in August 2017, saying the closure was a type of property development that required the commission’s approval and that his failure to obtain a permit before blocking access to Martins Beach was illegal. Khosla took his case to the nation’s high court after the California Supreme Court denied review of his appeal last October.

Khosla’s legal team, led by Clement, told the court that any interference by the state with his “fundamental right to exclude the public from private property” would be a type of confiscation — a “taking,” in legal terms — that requires compensation under U.S. Supreme Court property-rights rulings.

In asking the top court to grant a review, Clement claimed the state courts wrongly decided that “owners of private beachfront property in California may not exercise that right without first obtaining the government’s permission.”

At stake is the 1972 California Coastal Zone Conservation Initiative, which created the 12-member California Coastal Commission. The California Coastal Act, passed in 1976, prohibits homes or developments from blocking access to beaches, essentially making the entire California coast, including all beach property below the mean high-tide line, public property.

“This lawsuit began as a modest claim that the Coastal Act’s permit requirements apply to everyone,” said Eric Buescher, another lawyer representing Surfrider. “It grew into a fight over the future of public access along over 1,100 miles of coast in this state.”

Khosla, who has offered to grant an easement over his property for $30 million, was threatened with fines of up to $11,250 a day, or more than $4 million a year, for violating Coastal Commission rules. He has been opening the gate periodically.

The gate, even when locked, hasn’t dissuaded surfers, who continue to take advantage of the waves that crash into Khosla’s cove. Cotchett, on the other hand, said he fielded calls from officials stretching from Maine to San Diego expressing their worries that the court might allow roads and trails leading to thousands of beaches to be blocked by wealthy property owners.

“This is the seminal case of where this whole movement is going,” Cotchett said. “Five people can potentially say how much right you and I have to get to the beach.”