By Joan Lynch

A bill authored by the Central Coast’s state senator and signed into law last week is set to address a factor that can cause delays in coastal development in San Luis Obispo County: the California Coastal Commission’s appeals process.

On July 16, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 963 into law, which sets hard deadlines on the amount of time an appeal can languish in the Coastal Commission’s appeals process.

Authored by State Sen. John Laird, the newly signed law now requires the Coastal Commission to provide applicants whose projects have been appealed to the body with a complete list of any additional information needed to evaluate the appeal within 30 days after determining that an appeal raises a substantial issue, review any additional information submitted within 30 days and hold a hearing and issue a final decision within 180 days after receiving all requested materials.

That means that appeals can only be in the hearing process for a total of 240 days, or around eight months.

For some San Luis Obispo County homeowners, the current delays can be a long-term thorn in their side.

Coastal Community Builders founder and Shell Beach resident Gary Grossman said his own efforts to repair his coastal home’s seawall were dragged out in the appeals process for around seven years before settling the issue in court at great expense.

He said the new law will take some of that burden of time off of applicants and force the Coastal Commission to be more accountable to its own decision-making process.

“This will put pressure on the Coastal Commission to not be so Draconian, because what happens currently is they assess that if they drag you out seven or eight years, and it costs you a million dollars, you’re neither going to have the means nor the desire to take it further in court,” Grossman said. “That’s what usually happens, and that’s what happened to me.”

SB 963 cuts down on Coastal Commission appeal timeline

Laird’s new law establishes standardized appeal timelines for an agency that has largely been without them for most of its five-decade history, Pacific Legal Foundation state policy manager Rees Empey said.

While the Coastal Commission was required to act quickly to determine whether an appeal raises a “substantial issue,” there were no deadlines for the appeal process itself, meaning the process of evaluating an appeal could take months or years, Empey said.

“This is an issue that Pacific Legal Foundation ... has been following and been a part of in various ways over the more than five decades we’ve been around, so when we saw Senator Laird introduce this bill, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there might actually be some shot clocks put on the appeals process,’” Empey said. “These homeowners, property owners, developers, whoever it may be, just can’t be bled dry with a question mark of when they’ll receive a response whenever something’s appealed.”

According to the bill’s legislative analysis, it takes the Coastal Commission two to three months on average to decide on an appeal that does not raise a substantial issue and six to eight months to decide on an appeal that raises a substantial issue.

In 2024, the Pacific Legal Foundation’s scholars analyzed a batch of 5,712 different applications that were appealed to the Coastal Commission, Empey said. On average, the appeal process took between 330 and 511 days, and added an average $670 per day for a typical project, costing applicants hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars depending on the complexity of the project and length of delay.

In an email, Coastal Commission public information officer Joshua Smith said local governments approve nearly 90% of coastal development permits, which are approved by the Coastal Commission within two months on average. Smith also said less than 4% of locally approved coastal development permits are appealed to the Coastal Commission, and more than half of those appeals are found to raise no substantial issue.

Empey said this stretched-out appeal process and the Coastal Commission’s ability to appeal decisions to itself — as it did in the Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission case the state Supreme Court decided earlier this year — go “hand-in-hand” with each other as factors that can bog down applications in the bureaucratic process rather than giving applicants a hard answer.

“I appreciate Governor Newsom signing SB 963 into law,” Laird said in a statement on the law’s signing. “This law creates a clearer, more predictable appeals process that will benefit local governments, applicants, and communities alike. It preserves the Coastal Commission’s authority and the protections of the Coastal Act while making the process easier to understand and navigate for everyone involved.”

New law to go into effect early next year

After passing the legislature without opposition and being signed into law on July 16, the law will go into effect on the first day of the new year.

Grossman said while it’s “too late for me,” some of his neighbors on Indio Drive may find the appeals process easier to navigate than he did. He said he hopes the streamlined process will bring more fairness to the Coastal Commission’s deliberation.

“It’s not fair for the Coastal Commission to have no deadlines,” Grossman said. “I think that this is good policy coming from the state, and it’s in reaction to some really unfair stuff.”

Published in The Tribune.