Santa Barbara County’s plan for how to handle beach erosion at Goleta Beach Park — one of the county’s most heavily used parks — took a decisive step forward Thursday morning, with the county Parks Commission voting 4-1 to approve a rough draft proposal aimed at protecting the park from being washed away by storms.
Dubbed “Goleta Beach 2.0,” the project is a departure from the permeable pile pier option — which was to have been a series of wooden piles placed alongside Goleta Pier and designed to retain sand in front of the park — that was shot down by the state Coastal Commission in July.
“Goleta Beach 2.0 is a brand-new look at the planning process. We’ve stepped back far enough to take a fresh perspective and think outside the box,” said Santa Barbara County Deputy Parks Director Eric Axelson, explaining to the commission that his department plans to bring a concept plan to the Board of Supervisors this spring that can be turned into an engineered solution to Goleta Beach’s erosion problem.
Although the plan is still in its early stages, Axelson laid out a number of features that the parks department would like to see included. Relocating parking areas off-site is being looked at, as is creating a separate entrance bridge for cyclists and pedestrians. A boat landing for canoes and kayaks, and a concession for their rental, is proposed, and interpretive trails and kayak tours of the Goleta Slough also are under consideration.
Perhaps most noteworthy because of its potential expense is a proposal to relocate water, sewer and high-pressure natural gas lines that currently run through the middle of the park fairly close to the beach farther inland to more permanently protect them from stormy seas.
“We think there’s a regulatory benefit to be gained by clustering those utility lines,” said Axelson, adding that while using the existing Highway 217 corridor would be ideal, he’s not sure whether Caltrans would be willing to cooperate with such a plan.
A Bit of Background
Erosion occurs at most beaches, but at Goleta Beach, the ocean has gouged away significant chunks of the sandy beach during the past 25 or so years, sometimes coming right up to the parking area or taking away pieces of turf. County officials and the park’s patrons, concerned that the wide swaths of grassy, beachside open space the park is famous for would be washed away, have clamored for the park to be protected whenever this occurs.
A working group of concerned community members, geologists, environmentalists and other experts was formed eight years ago, and among the first suggestions was the possibility of erecting some kind of stone protective structure.
Moffatt & Nichol, an engineering firm specializing in such work, was hired to explore the option, but environmental groups protested, maintaining that hard protective structures — such as walls and jetties — elsewhere along the California coast and around the world had caused unintended erosion impacts at other locations.
Emergency rock revetments, which are essentially piles of rock running the length of the beach to protect grassy areas and public utility lines, have been allowed at various times by the Coastal Commission, but environmentalists — most notably the Santa Barbara Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation and the Environmental Defense Center, a law firm that represents the grassroots activist group — contend they were supposed to have been removed at some point.
They championed an option called managed retreat, whereby structures, utility lines and the west end parking area at Goleta Beach Park would be moved away from the beach to allow what they said would be a more natural erosion buffer zone. The rocks, they maintained, would destroy the beach as storm surges scoured sand away from the unyielding barrier they created.
Throughout the ideological battle that has ensued during the better part of the past decade over how best to manage the beach’s erosion problem, proponents for armoring have said that at the very least, the revetments should stay put, and that moving structures and essentially doing nothing amounted to capitulation of a valued community resource.
Eventually, the county chose the permeable pile pier option — with Moffatt & Nichol placed on retainer to design the project — as the best solution.
Suzanne Perkins, the parks commissioner representing the county’s 1st Supervisorial District, noted at Thursday’s presentation that the commission had spent countless hours reviewing the permeable pile pier project, eventually gaining the support of the coastal commission’s staff, which recommended approval of the project in July.
“The permeable pier was not a controversial project,” she said. “Only one group thought it was controversial.”
Perkins cast the lone vote against Goleta Beach 2.0 this week.
But last summer, the EDC consulted with David Revell, a coastal processes scientist with Philip Williams & Associates, plying the coastal commission staff with their own facts and figures about coastal erosion.
It came to the attention of the commission that alternate Commissioner Dan Secord had lobbied in favor of the project, which Secord claimed was an unwitting violation of the rules. Whether his 11th-hour ouster from the final vote on the project had anything to do with the outcome was unclear. But nine of the 10 coastal commissioners who cast a vote in July were adamant that with its expense, the permeable pile option was too much of a crapshoot. They wanted to hear more about park reconfiguration, which sounded in its description like a close cousin of managed retreat.
The Continuing Showdown
During the public comment period at Thursday’s hearing, a number of opponents of park reconfiguration shared their grievances. Mostly members of a vestige of the original working group, the Goleta Beach Park Coalition — led by Secord, Goleta resident Ed de la Torre and flanked by Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Kristen Amyx — they asserted that maintaining a backstop revetment to protect the park and public utility infrastructure should be of utmost importance.
“Considering the extensive use of Goleta Beach Park and the societal value of the current assets and infrastructure, it is imperative that this facility be preserved and protected in the exact same state as it now exists,” said de la Torre, quoting a statement he had prepared for the commission.
Goleta City Councilman Michael Bennett, appointed last year by the council to address the Goleta Beach issue, also expressed concerns about how much good the county’s new plan would actually do.
“There’s a lot to like about Goleta Beach 2.0. But based on what I heard from coastal commissioners last July, we are absolutely a guinea pig in this effort,” he said, asserting that if remote parking is included as part of the plan, it would cause the well-used park to go by the wayside.
Also weighing in were a number of environmentalists, representing groups such as the Surfrider Foundation, the EDC and the More Mesa Preservation Coalition.
“Why we care about this issue is because whatever happens to Goleta Beach directly affects the beaches below More Mesa,” said Valerie Olsen, a member of the More Mesa Preservation Coalition’s Board of Directors.
Surfrider and the EDC maintained their longtime position opposing hard structures and pushing for relocation of utilities, stressing their view that scientific evidence showed that structures such as revetments and even permeable piers merely shift an erosion problem to another area.
“The project before you is already a compromise that EDC and Surfrider can get behind,” EDC environmental analyst Brian Trautwein said in reference to comments made by Amyx and others about Goleta Beach 2.0. He said the EDC and Surfrider would speak in support of the plan when it goes before the Coastal Commission if the revetments are removed, calling the alternative proposed by de la Torre at Thursday’s hearing “DOA.”
“Rock revetments are never put in place to protect the beach, but to protect areas upland of the beach. They are known around the world to narrow beaches,” he said, noting that based on a scientific concept known as Pacific Decadal Oscillation — a 30-year cycle of sand deposition and accretion — Goleta Beach should be entering a period of deposition within the next several years, meaning wider beaches.
— Noozhawk staff writer Ben Preston can be reached at bpreston@noozhawk.com.