Until a couple of months ago, Charles Lester thought everything was going well at his post as the California Coastal Commission’s executive director. Lester, whose hiring was unanimously approved by the commission just four and a half years ago, had racked up a number of accomplishments as its second director ever—including securing a bigger staff, streamlining complex processes and finding compromise on controversial projects.
Looking back, Lester now sheepishly admits that he was considering asking for a raise. That was, until last December, when he got an unfavorable performance review from commissioners. Suddenly the Soquel resident realized his days at the commission, which oversees more than 1,000 miles of coastline, might be numbered.
Lester received notice of his possible termination in January and opted for a public hearing on the decision.
“The notice itself wasn’t a total surprise, although the exact timing was a little surprising,” Lester says.
Lester, who is known for being low-key and soft-spoken, is technically still employed by the commission, helping staff transition to Senior Deputy District Jack Ainsworth’s leadership, while members look for an interim executive director.
Lester’s termination set off a firestorm of environmentalist outrage, with more than 600 people showing up to his hearing in Morro Bay and giving six hours of testimony. Due to lobbyists’ growing influence on the commission, politicians and activists all over the state have said that pro-development interests were behind the firing—something Lester says appears to be true.
Commissioners, who called for the termination and approved it on a 7-5 vote, gave their own reasons for the change, some vague and some dubious.
One was the worry that the Coastal Commission staff, 95 percent of which signed a letter supporting Lester, doesn’t accurately reflect the diversity of the state. Although Lester called the accusation “a misdirection,” he doesn’t take the issue of diversity lightly.
“It’s really important. I’m not saying it isn’t. I felt like I was addressing it. Is there more to do? Yep. There’s more to do,” Lester says.
Lester had actually just released an update on the state of diversity in the Coastal Commission as part of that month’s director’s report. The report’s numbers reveal a staff that, although not a cultural melting pot, is in step with other state agencies. According to the report, the staff’s racial diversity is actually about double that of environmental groups in the state, with people of color on staff coming out to 29 percent. “By that measure, the numbers weren’t terrible. Again, they weren’t good enough, so we were working on it,” he says.
In the past few years, a discussion has been brewing that goes well beyond the Coastal Commission about a disconnect between environmental groups on the one side and diversity organizations and communities of color on the other.
The Diversity Green Institute released a report in July 2014 criticizing environmental groups across the country for having embarrassingly white staffs. Called “Green Insider’s Club,” the report examined government agencies, nonprofits and foundations. It recommended that groups institute annual diversity assessments, incorporate goals into performance evaluations and increase resources for new initiatives to work and combat this problem.
“People recognize it. It is alive and well in the nonprofit sector in general and the environmental community in particular,” says Christina Cuevas, the program director for the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County. “They were just a little late coming to the table on that.”
The foundation, which supports many local environmental groups, has guidelines that nonprofits need to make diversity an issue, both in terms of their own make-up and in terms of the people they reach. It’s important to create environmental stewardship in historically underserved communities like Watsonville, she says. “People making decisions about programs should reflect the community so, that they understand what the community wants and needs,” says Cuevas.
For his part, Lester’s report from February had outlined steps that the Coastal Commission has been taking to change recruitment and outreach strategies. The group, for instance, has ramped up recruiting efforts in the state’s public universities. For one entry-level position, people of color in the applicant field increased to 51 percent, compared to 19 percent less than two years prior.
One of the obstacles to diversity, Lester’s report explained, might be that the coastal communities, where the commission has offices, are often less diverse, more affluent areas with a higher cost of living.
What’s at stake may go beyond the staff itself, though.
Lester feels that, in some ways, the commission works in social justice for its commitment to protecting the coast for all Californians, even those who live within inner-city communities or farther from the coast. He hopes that this focus doesn’t change under a new director, as many people have suggested it might.
“There’s a lot more work to do to building bridges to all of California’s communities, so that people can enjoy the coast more equally,” Lester says. “And that’s just something we’ll have to keep working on. Every time an access way is opened or protected, that’s a step in the right direction. Every time a prohibitive parking restriction shuts down access or somehow prevents people from getting to the beach, that’s a step backwards, and those are the kinds of things we fought against.”
Another criticism lobbed at the commission staff is that it takes too long to process applications. Lester notes that wait time for many approvals dropped significantly after the governor’s office increased its staff a few years ago. He also says that big projects sometimes warrant long waits and that sometimes it’s a developer who creates an impasse.
“You get this narrative created that somehow there’s a problem, when in fact it reflects the necessary process to make sure we’re following the law and protecting the resources as the Coastal Act states,” Lester says. “I’m not saying there aren’t cases where something could have been done more efficiently. Every once in awhile, someone drops the ball. That happens in every organization. But I think overall, if you look at the commission’s record and you look at the data, the commission’s doing a pretty good job.”

The surf is pounding Twin Lakes State Beach just yards from Katherine O’Dea, executive director of Save Our Shores, who is sitting on a log by a rocky jetty.
The beach is, at most, a five-minute walk from the Save Our Shores office at the Santa Cruz Harbor, and this sandy destination is hardly a sliver of the 1,100 miles of California shoreline that is protected and open to everyone, thanks to a California ballot measure passed in 1972. After a recent shakeup at the California Coastal Commission, which is charged with protecting the coast, O’Dea worries that the future of California’s shores may soon be in limbo.
“Everyone does at least have the potential for access, even though everyone doesn’t access it,” says O’Dea, who has lived on the East Coast from Maryland to New Hampshire. “Even around here, there’s a lot of people who never get to the beach. We have that potential. On the East Coast, a lot of it is bought up. Private land—you can’t access the coast for miles, hundreds of miles. So, to have this is an incredible treasure. If we don’t protect it, we’re just insane. It’s insane.”
The disruption that has O’Dea flummoxed is the firing of Coastal Commission executive director Charles Lester on a 7-5 commission vote. It isn’t clear what exactly is behind the decision to lay off Lester. Commissioners spoke in vague terms about what he could have done better, and the group conducted part of its latest meeting, held in Morro Bay, in closed session.
With so little explanation and so much secrecy, it’s hard not to think that there may be something nefarious afoot. Environmentalists, like State Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley), are worried that pro-development money and professional lobbyists are behind the change.
“There’s long been a tension between the lobbyists who go there [and the commission],” says Stone, a former coastal commissioner himself. “And there have been some very strong relationships with certain commissioners—take them out to lunch, take them out to dinner.”
It’s difficult to track lobbying’s influence on the body, because Coastal Commission lobbyists don’t have to identify themselves—although Stone, along with two other lawmakers, introduced a bill two days after Lester’s firing that would force them to register as lobbyists.
For Lester’s Feb. 10 hearing, Stone and O’Dea both drove to Morro Bay—along with over 600 Californians eager to defend Lester. Beginning immediately after the meeting, O’Dea says she went through several stages of grief, starting with disbelief. Lester, who lives in Santa Cruz, could not be reached for comment for this story.
Locally, the commission and its staff have not been immune from criticism in recent years, taking flack for what some called a series of overreaches. Cyclists were up in arms when the commission sent the Arana Gulch Multi-Use Trail back to the drawing board in 2010. The following year, politicians like Lynn Robinson and Ryan Coonerty criticized the commission when it rejected plans for the La Bahia Hotel.
Stone thinks each of those proposals came back as better projects before ultimately getting approved by the commission—as 80 percent of projects eventually do. He says much of the power of the commission is in negotiating, and he worries that the art of working with developers will be lost under the commission’s next director.
Fred Keeley, a former Santa Cruz County treasurer and lawmaker, agrees that the group’s negotiating power could be at stake. He fears that the ultimate result of Lester’s firing will be new developments benefiting no one but the rich, and leaving large portions of the coast blocked off to the rest of Californians.
The Coastal Commission has 12 members, with eight appointed by the state legislature. Four more are appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who chose not to intervene in this matter, calling it “a personnel issue” in the days leading up to the vote. That didn’t sit well with Keeley and other environmentalists.
Keeley notes that Brown, whose four appointees all voted to fire Lester, is the only person who has the power to change his appointments any time he wants.
“Because the governor’s appointees serve at the pleasure of the governor, the governor must agree with what his appointees did,” Keeley explains. “He’s the only appointing authority who could do something about it if he did disagree. And to me, this is an incredibly important decision. This is not a land-use decision. This is the heart and soul of the Coastal Commission.”
Stone says that the governor “should be embarrassed” of what transpired.
Ocean lovers are anxious to see how the Coastal Commission weighs in on Martins Beach in San Mateo County, where Bay Area billionaire Vinod Khosla bought land two years ago. Khosla has closed a road to the beach, cutting off coastal access.
The firing of one person, of course, doesn’t mean that Santa Cruz’s beaches may become overrun with high-rise housing complexes anytime soon. Former Coastal Commissioner Gary Patton says that Measure J, which voters approved in 1978, should provide a framework for protecting natural areas, including beaches.
Former Santa Cruz mayor Mike Rotkin says most politicians in the county are very environmentally sensitive and that noticeable changes would be more likely in Southern California or Eureka County.
O’Dea, who has been at Save Our Shores for four months, says that the commissioners probably did not anticipate how Lester’s firing would put them under a microscope.
“No one in the environmental community is sitting back and saying, ‘Oh well, we tried,’” she says. “Everyone is still fired up. Everyone is still angry. So, it’s not going to get swept under the rug. If that was their intent to rule without much oversight, it’s not going to happen.”