Perhaps California should have made its entire 1,100-mile coastline a public park in the first place. But it did not. In fact, on those stretches of beach not publicly owned, it is neither illegal nor immoral to own private property seaward to the mean high tide line, a right that is rooted in California law and history.

ON MALIBU’S Broad Beach, private property begins at the mean high tide line. Yet a confusing hodgepodge of easements and property lines has led to a "beach war" between property owners and beach access activists.

On Malibu’s Broad Beach, where I have lived for more than 18 years, this right is now under assault. The result is an escalating "beach war," as one newspaper has called it. On one side are the homeowners and on the other are the California Coastal Commission, beach access activists and certain urban critics, along with reporters and editorial writers from some of the nation’s leading newspapers.

The situation has degenerated into a complex mess, hopelessly entangled in politics, conflicting agendas and personal animosities, compounded by misleading and often ill-informed press coverage. Sadly, there seems to be no rational settlement possible outside of a courtroom.

Broad Beach is about one mile long, flanked on either side by miles of open public beach. It is also accessible to the public through the adjacent Zuma Beach on the east and two vertical access paths running between houses on Broad Beach Road. The public has easy and unrestrained access to that portion of the beach seaward of the mean high tide line and other areas where landowners, often under pressure, have granted public easements.

Beginning nearly 40 years ago, the homeowners hired a professional surveyor to determine the location of the tide line each spring. The distances to the line were marked on 12-by-18-inch signs placed from 20 to 40 feet away on private property. Fixing the line is not rocket science, and, although it does shift with the sands, the line does not move very much during the critical summer months, except seaward as the beach builds up from calmer seas.

From just before July 4 until just after Labor Day, crowds are biggest, and the chance of incursion on private property is greatest. For this period, the homeowners’ association hired a service patrol to alert visitors when they ventured too far up on private land. Over the remaining nine and a half months of the year there was no beach patrol at all, and most people respected the privacy of the homeowners.

Land Grab
About 10 years ago, we began to read a series of newspaper articles accusing the homeowners of using guards to keep public visitors from accessing the beach. It was true that they patrolled the beach on ATVs, but we were puzzled, and a little amused, to hear some refer to them as goons and hired thugs.

Maybe we refused to take these first stories seriously enough. After all, homeowners had been coexisting peacefully with the public for many years on Broad Beach. In my years here, I have attended virtually every general homeowners’ meeting and at least a dozen board meetings, and I have yet to hear anyone suggest limiting the public’s right to their share of the beach.