"In the remaining areas, local government should be permitted to act within 

 criteria established. Should the criteria work hardship on local agencies, there 

 must be subvention . . . Local government must have more ready access to either 

 direct interdisciplinary advice or funds with which to obtain such advice . . . 

 Private property owners must receive some protection against costs dispropor- 

 tionate to benefits they may receive." * 



State 



It is at the State and local levels that most of the pressures have 

 been felt and most of the attempts at solution have been made. Though 

 helpful legislation has been passed, the result is what one would expect 

 from catch-as-catch-can solutions — the problems simply get bigger and 

 move up in priority. Although several States have moved toward compre- 

 hensive coastal zone management arrangements, this has not been, in 

 general, true in the past. State experience can be most instructive for 

 action at the Federal level. As one State official put it, the problems char- 

 acterizing State efforts at coastal zone management during the last 20 

 years have arisen from "expedience, inexperience, and lack of political 

 interest." Programs have often grown without sufficient statutory authority, 

 guidelines, or priorities, resulting in a tendency to make ad hoc decisions 

 on each issue as it arose. Continuing demands for more and more mineral 

 production, flood control, hurricane protection, navigation channels, and 

 the reclamation of wetlands for human habitation and agriculture, he 

 informed NACOA, have produced tremendous pressures on an ill-defined 



set of environmental priorities. 



"Such an approach to environmental management, at best, is partially effective 

 and only prolongs the agony of environmental degradation by partial control and 

 regulation of specific destructive activities and projects but which fails to accom- 

 plish very much control over the accumulative and quantitative effects of multiple 

 actions. At worst, (there) are cases of overzealous environmental agencies and 

 individuals which take a completely negative position on all environmental 

 manipulation and which would bring progress to a halt. Such an inflexible posi- 

 tion is self-defeating since neither the executive and legislative branches of gov- 

 ernment nor are industry and the public prepared for such drastic change. The 

 probable result will be rebellion against environmentalists and the environmental 

 position unless all branches of government and a majority of the public is fully 

 aware of the need for and the ramifications of such regulatory severity . . . 



". . . many of the same errors are being repeated on a national level as the 

 Federal Government wrestles with problems of coastal and environmental man- 

 agement. From the state's position, the Executive Branch of Government has not 

 spelled out the national environmental policy in sufficient detail and clarity, 

 particularly in the area of setting priorities, and there is much evidence that 

 the Legislative Branch is still proposing vast public works projects and industrial 

 development that are environmentally disruptive while expecting and promising 

 environmental protection and management in the same locality. Legislative de- 

 mands for incompatible activities create an almost impossible position for state 



* "Statement for Presentation to NACOA," 27 April 1972, George Dawes, Harbor 

 and Tidelands Administration, City of Newport Beach, Calif. 



35 



