When access is not just access: unveiling the administrative agendas pertaining to coastal access in California

Abstract

Opening and maintaining public access to the coast, as it is for any coastal management agencies in the US, has long been one of the prime missions of the California Coastal Commission. In this article, we ask: what are the administrative agendas latent in coastal access in California? Using webscraping, we collected over 10,000 staff reports prepared by the Commission between 1996 and 2016 and examined how the agency used the permitting process to attain its missions. Using the topic modeling technique, we identified 18 key administrative agendas in the staff reports pertaining to public access. These agendas reveal a wide spectrum of environmental protection strategies that the Commission pursued along with maintaining public access. While some of these topics narrowly focus on coastal accessibility (e.g. easements, trails and paths), and utilization (e.g. recreational activities, piers, parking), many of them extend beyond and cover broader, more controversial environmental agendas, such as shoreline and sensitive habitat protection. We also explored the stability of these administrative agendas over time. We observed notable stability in these efforts in the past two decades, despite personnel changes.