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Days prior to the Encinitas Planning Commission vote in July 2018, news helicopters hovered above the bluff to get aerial footage of the trail. Reporters from San Diego TV stations interviewed Marsh. Preserve Beacon’s collected 835 signatures opposing the project, and as people packed the council chambers that evening, the number rose to 910. An overflow crowd spilled outside.

City staff and geologists presented the project in a straightforward fashion. The bluff was unstable, the parking lot had to retreat, 11 spaces would be lost, and Neptune would narrow slightly. Since Beacon’s gets more than 3,000 visitors on its busiest days, access had to be maintained, per the Coastal Act, and that was best done with stairs. Alternatives from the public had been considered. But soft options, like planting more vegetation on the bluff, wouldn’t stop a landslide. Hard options, like seawalls, wouldn’t get approval from the all-powerful coastal commission. This project would. Ultimately, that’s where the rubber met the road.

When it came time for the general public to speak, after weeks of not getting to, it was like an El Niño storm wave growing, strengthening, and finally exploding at the base of an eroding bluff. Many speakers focused on how special Beacon’s and the trail were. They had raised their kids there. They had made lifelong friends there. The bluff, trail, and beach formed the beating heart of Leucadia. ­Others called the proposed stairway a “monstrosity” that would destroy the community. “We want to ensure that Beacon’s character, charm, and heart is maintained,” pleaded Jade Machado, who broke into tears. She called her community wonderfully eclectic and declared, “We are Beacon’s Beach.” She had attended the previous meetings, and it was clear “the city didn’t understand how important maintaining the character of Beacon’s is to the people who frequent this beach.”

Others hammered on a seeming inconsistency. Labeling Beacon’s an emergency enabled the city to bypass a state-required environmental review and complete the project faster. But if Beacon’s truly presented an emergency, why wasn’t the beach being closed altogether? The city didn’t have a satisfying answer for this. Beyond the fact that an environmental review 12 years earlier resulted in a recommendation to move the parking lot and build a staircase, the best thing anyone could come up with was an unsettling answer from Jim Knowlton, the city’s consulting geologist. He said he did recommend closing Beacon’s in 2006, and doing so nearly cost him his job. Elected officials, like the mayor in the movie Jaws, told him that closing Beacon’s was not an ­option. Still, Knowlton assured the crowd that the bluff could collapse at any moment, an assertion that speaker after speaker refused to believe.

Both Surfrider and managed retreat took a beating that night. Nobody threw more haymakers than a local named Charlie McDermott. At the time, McDermott didn’t live on Neptune, but not long after the battle he purchased a $7.9 million bluff-top home up the street from Beacon’s. (He went on to advocate for legislation that would allow homeowners in Southern California to armor eroding bluffs; the bill went nowhere.) McDermott threatened a lawsuit if the city approved this project. He suggested the city should armor Beacon’s. “Not all of us agree that letting the entire coast collapse so [the government] can take over private property or reclaim public property is a good policy,” he said. The city had “done a backroom deal with Surfrider. We didn’t elect Surfrider,” he added. “Surfrider is not a state agency.” Later, Ed Machado, Jade’s ­father, piled on. “One of my surf-team members at UCLA started the Surfrider Foundation, Glenn Henning,” he said. “I was at the first meeting 40 years ago. I was a member for 40 years until they completely lost touch with what’s going on with a community like Leucadia. I am no longer a member.”

Jaffee couldn’t attend that night, so the burden of confronting these pitchforks fell to his colleague, Chunn-Heer. She explained that there had been no deals “behind closed doors,” that since 2001 Surfrider had clearly stated its intentions about Beacon’s in public meetings and on its website. She explained that bluff erosion is a natural process that cannot be stopped. She said she would have loved all this support for Beacon’s over the past 18 years when Surfrider was fighting off seawalls to save the beach. But the crowd hissed and tried to shout her down, drawing the ire of planning commissioners. ­“Surfrider’s only agenda is enjoying and recreating and accessing the beach,” Chunn-Heer said. “It’s a delicate balance.”

But the commissioners could read the room. After four hours of impassioned speaches, they rejected the project unanimously. The crowd went nuts.

The fight didn’t end there. Commissioners told city staff that if it returned in six months with a design more reflective of Leucadia’s aesthetic, they would consider it. The staff designed a less intrusive wooden staircase. But by then Preserve Beacon’s had serious momentum. Marsh, McDermott, and others spent months strategizing, and when the commission met again in December, the crowd unleashed even more passion. The stairs would destroy Leucadia. Narrowing Neptune was dangerous. Managed retreat was a political ideology. Surfrider was thoroughly corrupt.

The commission again denied the project. Several months later, the city moved the $3.4 million earmarked for Beacon’s to the Leucadia Streetscape project. Save for a bit of trail maintenance and some landscaping, Beacon’s would remain unchanged.

Local kitsch in Leucadia (Tom Fowlks)

A seawall in Del Mar (Tom Fowlks)

The alternative route to the beach (Tom Fowlks)

The parking lot at Beacon’s (Tom Fowlks) "],"renderIntial":true,"wordCount":350}'>

After twenty years, three scuttled projects, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, the Beacon’s parking lot remains at the edge of a bluff geologists deem extremely dangerous. Whether Surfrider or anyone else could have done something different to change that outcome, who knows? “Sentimentality plays a big role,” says Jennifer Savage, Surfrider’s former statewide policy manager. “People feel attached to something. They don’t want to see it change. They can’t see the scientific alternatives.” Chunn-Heer says she approached the Beacon’s fight hoping to educate people. “Often people want things they don’t realize are in conflict. ‘I want a walkable beach’ and ‘I want things to stay the same.’ Well, which do you want more, the trail or the beach? Those things are in conflict.”

Tony Kranz, deputy mayor of Encinitas, says that city planners have produced drawings of different parking-lot configurations, but there are no immediate plans or budget to relocate it. This makes him uneasy. “We’re rolling the dice that the bluff is not going to slide again,” he says. “We get a good rain, it could go at any time. If a 50-foot section decided to go down, how much would it take with it?” As for Encinitas’s long-term plan to deal with sea-level rise, the plan requested by the coastal commission, the city is still working on it. “I won’t predict how that will play out, but I can tell you if you want to generate controversy, bring up managed retreat. Look at Del Mar. That city council retreated very fast. It was barely managed when they retreated because they had a chamber full of people saying, ‘Hell no.’ ”

Along the entire California coast, only a handful of communities have included some form of managed retreat in long-range plans to address sea-level rise. But these are towns like Marina and Pacific Grove, places with little coastal development, or development not threatened by erosion. “Basically, the easier cases have made progress. The harder cases, not so much,” says Charles Lester, former executive director of the commission. “Where plans have been approved, it’s places where there is less tension between private property and public shoreline ­management.”

Donne Brownsey, vice chair of the commission, says planning 75 years into the ­future is mind-boggling for everyone. “Communities are just starting to come to grips with this,” she says. “This isn’t like wildfires. This is a slow-moving disaster. But it’s because we understand the importance of people’s homes and the character of their communities that we want to help them plan. People blame us, but the commission isn’t causing rising seas. Flooding and erosion are going to happen.”

If a community can’t agree on moving a parking lot on a dangerous cliff, how
will entire neighborhoods agree to relocate when sea-level rise ultimately demands it?

What managed retreat should look like exactly is something governments around the world are struggling with. It probably shouldn’t look like the approach that Manila, in the Philippines, has taken over the past decade, with residents of coastal slum communities being lured outside the city to hastily built housing far from their social and employment networks. Many have simply returned to their flood-prone neighborhoods. New Zealand, by contrast, is close to approving world-first legislation that includes mandatory national direction on climate adaptation and, more importantly, provides central government funding for managed retreat. Inevitably, that’s the sticking point—who pays for it? Kranz says Encinitas could never afford to buy the multimillion-dollar homes on Neptune. In October, California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would have created a revolving loan program, allowing communities to buy valuable properties, rent them out, and use that money to repay the loans until the houses are no longer habitable.

However this all shakes out, Beacon’s remains a cautionary tale regarding process and community input. Jaffee acknowledges that Surfrider should have done more to win popular support. “We ate humble pie,” he concedes as we descend the trail one day. What he can’t abide are the conspiracy theories, the notion that Surfrider was somehow dealing under the table. “What are we supposed to gain? I’m a volunteer. I lose time from work and family whenever I do Surfrider stuff. How am I benefiting? All I know is you have to follow the science and do the right thing.”

He points out properties along Beacon’s beach where for years Surfrider has successfully fought homeowners who want seawalls, saving Marsh’s favorite beach in the process. He asks: “Where has Ari been for those fights?”