133 
without room for further expansion in terms of land acquisition. 
Therefore, we must do two things in the short run: (1) in the face of 
spiraling prices for shrinking amounts of available coastal land, State 
and Federal authorities must take immediate advantage of current 
opportunities for land acquisition, using all the legal tools available to 
them to preserve more shoreland for public recreational activity, and 
(2) recognizing the need for a better allocative mechanism, immediate 
steps must be taken at the Federal level to formulate a policy that 
successfully comes to grips with the complex issues that are raised 
when the present system is discarded. The purpose of this section is to 
focus attention on the political and economic questions that must be 
dealt with in the formulation of long-range policy. 
Establishing a political framework 
If the allocation of shoreline resources as public goods is to be 
handled in the public sector, then the first requisite is the development 
of some sort of alternative political framework within which manage- 
ment of the resource can take place. We have seen that the present 
framework of local political decisionmaking is wholly inadequate, 
while no political mechanisms exist that deal with our coast as a 
separate and unique entity. Yet, clearly the social costs and benefits 
of shoreline recreation go beyond every municipal boundary and spill 
over from State to State. It is clear that new institutional arrange- 
ments must be made so that long-range, comprehensive planning 
policies can be formulated in the development of a recreational system 
and to determine that allocation of coastal resources among multiple 
uses that maximizes the general well-being of society. What are these 
new arrangements to be? 
A major criterion that should be applied to new institutions is that 
the political decisionmaking unit affecting any particular use of coastal 
resources must be broadly based enough so that the parochial benefits 
of a given development project are not net benefits within its juris- 
dictional boundaries. We will recall that a coastal town may decide to 
zone its coastal property for industry, generating (secondary) benefits 
for the town, but not for the regional economy as a whole (e.g., if the 
area is a valuable beach site). If a State or regional body makes the 
decision, a more broad consideration of benefits to the regional 
populace would result. In this way a greater range of social costs and 
benefits can be weighed in the decisionmaking process! The clear 
implication is that planning for the use of coastal resources must be 
carried out at a more broadly based governmental level. 
Much careful consideration has been given to this issue at the 
Federal level, beginning with a report °° to the President and the 
Congress in 1962 by the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Com- 
mission (ORRRC). This study outlined the status of outdoor recrea- 
tion in America, describing in depth the conditions of supply and 
demand as outlined in this article. To resolve the problems of shoreline 
recreation, the ORRRC called for the establishment of new guidelines 
for planning and policy and the design of new institutional relation- 
ships to manage the complex set of interdependencies in a systematic 
way. These relationships would entail a redistribution of responsibility 
among governmental levels, with the States playing the pivotal role 
50 Tbid., reference 28. 
