The slow coastal permitting the city blames on Sacramento is a wound of its own making — and AB 1740 is the wrong way to close it.
If you have heard anything about AB 1740, you have probably heard that it is about speeding things up near the beach — clearing red tape so that housing, bike lanes, and outdoor dining do not languish for months waiting on a state agency. That is partially true, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else. But it leaves out the one question that explains all the rest, the question a good friend would stop you to ask: where did the red tape come from? The honest answer is uncomfortable. The delay Santa Monica blames on Sacramento is, almost entirely, a problem the city created for itself — and one it has had the power to fix for more than thirty years.
The mechanism
Start with how a coastal project actually gets approved, because the whole argument lives right here. California’s coast belongs, in law, to everyone, and in the 1970s the voters decided that no single city could be trusted to look after it alone. So they created a guardian — the California Coastal Commission — to review what gets built along the water.
A city can earn the right to do that reviewing itself. It writes its own coastal plan, called a Local Coastal Program (LCP), and the guardian checks the work. The plan comes in two parts: one that sets the goals — keep the beach reachable, the views open, the city ready for rising seas — and one that turns those goals into the actual zoning a builder has to obey. Get both approved, and the guardian hands the city the keys: one application, one review. Until that happens, the guardian keeps its authority, and every coastal project needs two approvals instead of one — the city’s, and then a separate permit from the Commission.
That double approval is what everyone means by the “dual process.” It is slower, and the slowness is real: the state’s review can add four to six months, and city staff say some businesses give up rather than wait. For a small shop living on a lease and a loan, that is a genuine cost, not an imagined one.
Where the delay comes from
Here is the part the bill’s supporters tend to hurry past. The dual process is not a fact of nature. It exists for one reason and one reason only: Santa Monica never finished its coastal plan. And it did not fail to finish it once. It failed three times.
In 1992, the city submitted its plan. The guardian approved the goals and rejected the zoning, and the city simply never went back to fix it. In 2014, it tried again — years of community meetings, sea-level studies, an updated plan the City Council adopted unanimously in 2018. That version stalled on the very same sticking point as in 1992, and rather than push it through, the city quietly withdrew its own plan before the Commission was required to rule. Three decades, three unfinished tries. The delay the city now calls intolerable is a wound it reopened, twice, with its own hand.
You can see the strain most clearly on the Third Street Promenade, which the city offers as Exhibit A. Empty storefronts, it says, are the price of slow permitting. Some of that is fair. But most of what empties a storefront — online shopping, the long decline of mall-style retail, rents, foot traffic — has nothing to do with the coast, and most of what fills one back up, a new tenant building out the same space, never triggers a coastal permit at all. The dual process is a real burden on the projects it actually touches. It is not why the Promenade has dark windows, and a law written as though it were, is aimed at the wrong target.
Two cures, not the same cure
Now the part that matters most, and the part the city tends to blur. There were always two ways to end the dual process, and they are not the same thing.
The first is to finish the coastal plan — which is, after all, the cure the law itself intends. The city writes its rules, the guardian approves them, and from that day forward the city reviews its own projects, with the public’s protections written into local law and the Commission still reachable on appeal. Faster permitting, guardian kept.
The second way is AB 1740. It also delivers faster permitting — but it gets there by removing the guardian outright for the exempted projects, with no approved plan standing behind it. Same speed, guardian gone.
And here is why that difference is not a technicality. The things at stake — beach access, an open view of the water — are not numbers you can measure. They are judgments. Once a project is approved and the view closes, a resident who feels something was taken is left arguing about a building that already exists, and a lost view leaves no receipt. That is the entire reason to want a guardian: not because the rules are exact, but because someone outside City Hall can still be asked to look before it is too late. The finished LCP keeps that someone in the room. AB 1740 shows them the door.
The tell
All of which makes the city’s most recent move the strangest of all. In late May, with public anger building, the City Council signed an MOU agreement with the Commission promising to finish the coastal plan — the very thing it had left undone for thirty years — by the end of 2027. The mayor remarked on how unusually fast the deal came together. It was fast. And in being fast, it proved something: the city could have done this almost any time it wanted to.
So the wound was always closable. Which leaves the question the second half of this story has to take up: if the cure is finally on the table, why is Santa Monica still pushing a bill — narrowed, shortened, but very much alive in the State Senate — built around a deadline in 2029? Next: who that deadline is really aimed at, and why a law the city may never need is worth keeping alive anyway.
Jack Hillbrand, Architect
For S.M.a.r.t.: Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow.
Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; 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; 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.
