The Queen of the Coastal Star Chamber

When the Star Chamber ruled atop Great Britain’s legal system for 150 years until its demise in 1641, it was characterized by secrecy, intrigue, and the often arbitrary and oppressive dispensing of what could hardly be called justice. California has its own Star Chamber, the California Coastal Commission, lorded over, for the time being at least, by a portly grandmother from Malibu, Sara Wan.

There is a pitched competition between California agencies for which is the most nonsensical in its implementation of over-reaching regulations. Certainly, the California Air Resources Board, which recently tried to ban black cars in the state in its fevered effort to save the world from global warming, is a strong contender. The California Energy Commission, which last year deprived Californians of the right to purchase large, high-performance LCD and plasma televisions — also to save the planet — is another contender. But none can top the Coastal Commission when it comes to imposing its will forcefully on the hapless Californians who are deemed to fall short of the Commission’s deep green political will.

It was the Coastal Commission that on a unanimous vote crushed a fireworks show in the tiny North Coast town of Gualala, obliterating any opportunity for the event’s sponsors to carry out their dream of honoring America, celebrating freedom and, hopefully, attracting some tourists to struggling local businesses. It was the Coastal Commission that successfully ordered Orange County retirees George and Sharlee McNamee to remove beach furniture from their own private property because they didn’t like the way it looked. Coastal Commission staff once tried unsuccessfully to declare a parking lot an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area, then succeeded a few years later in getting the Commission to declare another parking lot a wetland. And it recently took a Superior Court judge to slap down the Commission’s attempt to force a San Mateo couple, Dan and Denise Sterling, to farm their arid, sparsely vegetated 140 acres “forever,” in return for permission to build one home on it.

Behavior like this led Kimberly Strassel to write in the Wall Street Journal that the Commission took its authority to establish local coastal plans, and “Instead, it pulled a Saddam, investing itself with dictatorial powers over every last grain of the state’s 1.5 million acres of coastal property — public and private.”

In a very Hussein-like move, long-time coastal commissioner Sara Wan was elected on a split vote to her second term as chair at the Commission’s January meeting, shoving her long-time ally, Planned Parenthood’s former national chairwoman, Mary Shallenberger, out of her way in a power grab that was unseemly even by Commission standards. Wan, the leading voice for the hard-line environmentalist position on the Commission, is a grandmotherly electrical engineer who has devoted herself to full-time environmental activism since 1996 and is now in her 15th year on the Commission. In an obvious conflict of interest, she is the co-founder of Vote the Coast, which describes its purpose as “coastal protection and conservation through … a strategic assertion of power, forming alliances with other progressive causes and networking with environmental activists to develop a coordinated policy of coastal protection.” She also is a co-founder of ORCA, the Organization of Regional Coastal Activists, which trains activists in how to use the Coastal Act to stop development along the coast.

NEXT: Wan 'loves power and loves people knowing that she has power'