West Cliff Drive Emergency Armoring Followup, Santa Cruz

The Commission approved a permit for the City of Santa Cruz formalizing about 1,200 feet of emergency rock and seawalls along West Cliff Drive, most of which went in after the 2023–24 and 2024–25 winter storms. The permit also authorizes older riprap that went in under emergency permits decades ago and never received follow-up approval. Commission staff valued the armoring’s impacts on public beaches and sand supply at $18.3 million.

In place of a fee, the City offered an in-kind mitigation package that included targeted riprap removal, stairway repairs at Mitchell’s Cove, Indicator, and Cowell, view improvements, and a 600-foot realignment of West Cliff Drive inland into Lighthouse Field. Staff also counted the reopened road and trail - temporarily closed after storm damage - as partial “self-mitigation” since the road and trail serve public coastal access. 

The West Cliff Drive realignment is the most exciting aspect. Lighthouse Field is the one stretch of the corridor where the road can move back instead of being armored The City’s new LCP points to realignment there and calls for a shoreline adaptation plan by 2031.

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Surfrider and Save Our Shores asked the Commission to make those LCP commitments enforceable conditions of the permit, including requiring a CDP application for managed retreat across Lighthouse Field by 2031. Commission staff characterized Surfrider’s core request as outside the permit’s scope in an addendum, while the City responded directly, calling it premature because their adaptation plans haven’t yet gone through public review. In response, Surfrider asked the Commission to condition the LCP’s commitment to complete the Shoreline Adaptation Management Plan (SAMP) by 2031, as well as an application for the next phase of the adaptation at Lighthouse Field within 2-4 years after that. 

Commissioner Hart showed initial support for the idea, but Commission staff pushed back, citing the City’s need for flexibility to secure funding and its good-faith progress toward proactive adaptation.
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Surfrider comments + some Commission deliberation captured below: 

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This permit follows a familiar pattern that Surfrider refers to as the  “emergency to permanent permitting pipeline.” Rock and seawalls go in under “temporary” emergency permits, and years if not decades go by before the armoring comes back for full Coastal Act review. By that time the damage is already done, the armoring remains, and the mitigation - while well-intentioned - falls short of making the public whole. 

This is especially significant in Santa Cruz, whose recently updated LCP requires mitigation for armoring to be commensurate with the negative impacts it causes. In this case, no one weighed the mitigation package against the $18.3 million in losses staff identified. The mitigation package never addressed impacts to shoreline sand supply at all. 

Tying the City’s LCP commitments to the permit would have helped close that gap. While laudable, LCP planning deadlines are not enforceable if they’re missed. Permit conditions are. A condition requiring the City to stay on schedule would have been a backstop to what the City already committed to doing. It would have given the Commission and the public leverage to hold the City to its LCP commitment to adapt West Cliff Drive along Lighthouse Field without armoring, helping ensure the beaches there can be restored and preserved.

Unfortunately, the Commission chose not to exercise that leverage.

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