LEW REID is a quiet man, not someone who seeks the limelight, so not many people know of the major role he played 30 years ago, when Californians fought for their coast and won its protection for everyone’s use and enjoyment. “Success has many fathers,” as the saying goes—and mothers too, one might add—so only those who worked closely with Reid at the time may be aware that he was the principal author of Proposition 20, the 1972 voter initiative that created California’s coastal program and the Coastal Commission. Coast & Ocean visited Reid at his hilltop home near Sebastopol recently to hear the story of that now legendary campaign. He told an inspiring and exhilarating tale.

COAST & OCEAN: Proposition 20 became law on January 1, 1973, three decades ago. Many people now know nothing of that history. But is it important to know about it?

LEW REID: I’m not sure that the history is important to anyone other than historians, but there are some lessons. That was an extraordinary grassroots volunteer effort in which just shoe leather and cauliflower ears from the telephone outdid massive amounts of money that were spent to defeat the initiative. And it did cause a sea change in the way we think about land use along the California coast, and perhaps in other areas as well.

C&O: What catalyzed the “Save Our Coast” campaign?

LR: I’m thinking of the things that were happening in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In 1969 we had a big oil spill in Santa Barbara and there was continuing controversy over whether there should be offshore drilling in California. There was a proposal to make a big desalination plant on the Orange County coast. Then we had the nuclear power plants along the coast; that aroused a lot of opposition. And we had a system by which land use on a thousand miles of coast was regulated by countless counties and cities, without any overarching judgment over that land use. Coastal residential subdivisions were being permitted without consideration of their overall impact. Development interests were much more able to push their agendas with the local agencies, and the overall environmental point of view was very difficult to present without a regional agency.

C&O: The idea of planning and regulating for the whole coast as a single unit, was that new? And was California the first state to do this?

LR: I know we didn’t have models from other states to look at. The model was BCDC, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, established a couple of years earlier [1969] to regionalize land-use planning around San Francisco Bay.

C&O: Why couldn’t the Legislature pass a coastal act?

LR: It could have. We did not really expect to have to rely on the initiative process. In some sense we viewed the initiative we wrote as a companion to the bill we wrote; it was there as an inducement to the Legislature to act. There were two bills in the Assembly in the session that ended in 1970, one by Alan Sieroty and one by Pete Wilson. When the next session started, Alan Sieroty offered the bill we put together for the Coastal Alliance and we fully expected that we would get that bill through the Legislature. It passed overwhelmingly in the Assembly but got bottled up in a Senate committee. So then we had no choice but to campaign for the voter initiative.

I’m not generally enthusiastic about the initiative process. Having come to the coastal movement after three years as committee counsel in a Senate committee in Washington, D.C., I really value the legislative process, the give and take, and the way legislation is tested intellectually during that process. Initiatives tend to be written in a one-sided way, they’re not tested by debate and hearings, they’re “take it or leave it,” and I don’t think this is in general a good way to make our laws. So we had crafted our legislative bill, and then to create the initiative we removed a lot of the language that represented compromises that had been made to make the legislative bill more palatable to all sides, and we shortened the bill. We expected that having this initiative waiting in the wings would be an incentive for the Legislature, and the various interests in the Legislature, to come together behind the legislative bill.

C&O: Because the initiative was more pro-conservation?

LR: Exactly. And seeing that, the Senate still didn’t pass a bill. Maybe they thought we were bluffing.

C&O: Did Proposition 20, then, have the weaknesses you see as typical of initiatives, was it one-sided and inadequately tested?

LR: It certainly was tilted more toward conservation, more one-sided than the Sieroty bill that passed the Assembly, but we had the benefit of a year of hearings and negotiations on that bill to tease out the problems. Initiatives generally don’t have the benefit of hearings. We tried hard to be sure we wrote something that would be constitutional. We thought that if we wrote something that was thrown out in court we would never again have an opportunity to mount the kind of campaign that was mounted to pass it. So we tried to be very careful, to be sure that land-use restraints were reasonable, and that there was a policy purpose, clearly articulated, in the initiative to be a Constitutional foundation for the restrictions. Also, the temporary nature of the Commission at the outset and the need for subsequent legislative reauthorization helped to assure its validity.

[Proposition 20 established a Coastal Commission and gave it permit authority for four years, while a Coastal Plan was drafted and submitted to the Legislature.]

C&O: The Court of Appeal recently upheld a trial court decision that found the Commission to be unconstitutional because the majority of its members is appointed, without fixed terms, by the Legislature, which created the Commission. This was found to be a violation of the doctrine of separation of powers. Did this issue ever come up?

LR: No. Prop 20 gave only one-third of the appointments to the Legislature. Half were from regional commisions. It seemed to me a rather awkward compromise to spread the appointment authority for the other half (the so-called “public members”) among the governor, the Assembly speaker, and the Senate Rules Committee. The purpose was to prevent anyone from packing the Commission. [The regional commissions ceased to exist when the 1976 Coastal Act was passed.]

C&O: What would have been an alternative?

LR: I don’t recall alternatives ever being considered because it was clear the environmental community wanted the appointive power to be spread so that the power of any one person was dissipated.

C&O: How do you see it in retrospect?

LR: It seems to have worked, but I still prefer executive appointments with legislative advice and consent.

C&O: The Commission has one great weakness, in that the person who appointed a commissioner can also remove that commissioner at will. Was that anticipated?

LR: I don’t think so. The original public members were appointed for a term, namely the initial life of the Commission that ended in 1976. I presume the “at will” appointments are a product of the 1976 Coastal Act. Under the present system the commissioners must be under intense political pressure on some decisions.

C&O: While you were in Washington as minority counsel for the Senate Interior Committee, some major environmental legislation was in the works at the federal level, right?

LR: It was a robust time for expanding the National Park System. In California we created the Redwood National Park and worked on expanding the Point Reyes National Seashore. We also worked on the Wild Rivers Act and implementation of National Wilderness legislation. Probably one of the most significant things that was happening at the time was the incubation of the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA]. That was introduced for the first time in 1967 or ’68 in the Senate. It was the brainchild of consultants and staff for Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington. It was passed in 1970, a year after I left Washington. The NEPA model—requiring a look at the environmental impacts of projects, which on paper seemed pretty benign—caused a profound change in attitudes toward projects. It was an environmental Trojan Horse.

Before NEPA there was an intellectual struggle about how to value conservation and recreational values. For example, where Forest Service lands were managed for multiple use, there were struggles to quantify the economic value of environmental uses. How do you put a dollar value on scenery? In the past 30 years environmental economists have become much more sophisticated, but at that time the efforts were very crude.

C&O: But NEPA did not require that you put a dollar value on it. So that was a value shift.

LR: Exactly. That’s what I think was so revolutionary about NEPA: it didn’t require that you make an economic quantification of the value of recreation or scenery or ecological systems; it merely said you have to see if there are significant adverse impacts, and if there are, tell of ways to mitigate them. This was a profound shift, and some of that new thinking certainly carried over into the coastal bills because we were asking that a broad range of environmental impacts be taken into account in making land-use decisions.

C&O: You came back to California during this interesting time and returned to your private law practice. What led you to get involved in the Coastal Alliance? And what was that Alliance, exactly?

LR: It was an umbrella association of all the groups that supported the coastline. Janet Adams was the spark plug. She came out of the fight to create BCDC and she really ignited the Coastal Alliance. [State Senator] Peter Behr told Janet I should be drafted as the counsel for the Coastal Alliance. I had worked with him when he was the spokesman for expanding Point Reyes in ’66 and ’67. At Peter’s suggestion, I met with Janet, and no one says no to her.

C&O: Would you describe Janet Adams?

LR: She’s just absolutely wonderful—a dynamic, energetic, nonstop, ethical, principled dynamo. She’s like a bulldozer with heart.

C&O: Who were some other key people you worked with?

LR: She had a close friend, Alex Donald, since passed away, who raised money. Then there were legislators who were important, the principal one being Alan Sieroty, and his assistant, Peter Douglas; but also Pete Wilson before he became the mayor of San Diego, Paul Priolo, Arlen Gregorio, Don Grunsky, and John Dunlap were influential, and Bob Moretti, speaker of the Assembly. There were volunteers like Bill Kortum, Phyllis Faber, . . . I could go on and on—there were thousands of people and dozens of organizations involved. Two young lawyers in my firm worked very hard on the campaign: Ray McDevitt, who is still practicing in San Francisco, and Ron Gilson, who is now a Stanford law professor. Bill Press, whom you see on cable TV these days as a Washington, D.C. talking head, ran our PR. No one was compensated, every bit of the effort was volunteer. The campaign commanded the passion of legions of people.

Janet and the leaders of the Alliance managed to avoid the infighting you often see in environmental campaigns. I remember the Redwood National Park’s creation was slowed down for years because the Sierra Club wanted the park in one place and the Save-the-Redwoods League wanted it in another. There was very little of that kind of thing in the Coastal Alliance. One organization did bolt and gum up progress in the Senate, but we probably would never have gotten a bill through the Senate anyway.

C&O: The conflicts were worked out ahead of time?

LR: In part by the process by which we created both the bill and consensus around the bill.

C&O: How did that go?

LR: There were many meetings to cement the cooperation. In early 1971 I took the bills Pete Wilson and Alan Sieroty had introduced in the legislative session that ended in 1970, and tried to extract from them all the key issues that needed a decision. We brought leaders of all the environmental and interest groups that were part of the Coastal Alliance together in my office. During weekend sessions we attacked the issue list. For example, “How do you appoint?” was an issue. “How wide is the coastal zone” and “What is to happen within it?” At the end of the day we had come to a consensus on what the environmental point of view would be on all of the critical components of the bill. That was the grist for drafting the bill. I chaired that meeting, and I don’t recall it as having been a difficult process at all. It was a collaborative process rather than a boisterous one.

Then I used those decisions to prepare a draft of the bill [AB 1471] that was introduced by Mr. Sieroty in the spring of 1971. Throughout that year he and Peter Douglas and I were in constant contact as new issues were raised in the legislative process. Later, we took that bill and the same fundamental decisions and wrote a second, shorter, bill, which was the initiative.

C&O: The key issue was public access, I’ve been told. That was what everyone cared about the most. What about other things?

LR: I do remember great concern about development, both commercial and residential development at the water’s edge. There were lots of impending projects up and down the coast, there were concerns at Monterey, Malibu, Sonoma, and also south of Big Sur.

We entered 1972 not knowing what was going to happen in the Legislature. When it became clear our bill wasn’t going to pass the Senate, we had to crank up the initiative process and get the signatures and get qualified for the November ballot.

C&O: What highlights stand out for you from the “Save Our Coast” campaign?

LR: Three come to mind.

The owner of the Firehouse Restaurant in Sacramento, who was also the husband of a prominent San Franciscan, sued the attorney general, the secretary of state, the county clerks of all the big counties, and the Coastal Alliance, claiming that our ballot description was fraudulent and it should have been kicked off the ballot. He claimed that because there were tides at his dock in Sacramento, we were trying to regulate his use of his property. But he didn’t read the bill carefully enough. We got into a preliminary injunction hearing in Sacramento with a wonderful judge, Judge Perluss, who quickly saw that the coastal zone stopped at the Golden Gate Bridge [San Francisco Bay is under BCDC jurisdiction] and tossed the case out of court. But it did cause consternation for a few days. And since none of the governmental parties had a real interest, I had the fun of handling the case myself.

C&O: Then there was the billboard incident, right?

LR: The opponents were trying to sound as though their message was the environmental message. Their PR campaign had a slogan: “Don’t lock up the beach, vote no on 20.” A young man who was running a public interest law firm in Los Angeles called to say he was going to sue the opponents’ PR firm, charge them with fraud, and get the “No on 20” campaign enjoined. It was clear to me that he was going to lose that case because the First Amendment protects free speech and you can’t have prior restraints on that kind of political speech. So I knew we would have a disaster on our hands if we had a law suit claiming the ads were fraudulent and the suit was thrown out of court on constitutional grounds.

Speaker of the Assembly Bob Moretti was a great friend of the Coastal Alliance. We talked with him and he then held a press conference in front of one of those huge “No on 20” billboards and told the press that the sign was fraudulent and that he was going to hold hearings on fraudulent political advertising. He convened a hearing, brought the head of the PR firm that had created the ad before the hearing, and completely discredited the anti–Prop 20 advertising. Actually, it was a little poignant because the PR man, who had a substantial reputation in California, was humiliated by being denounced by a legislative committee.

But it did make the point that the advertising was fraudulent, and in a setting in which we did not overstep any constitutional limits.

C&O: Great strategy. And the third episode?

LR: The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] was also involved. This, in some ways, was the most fun of all because it combined legal machinations with the work of volunteers. One of our biggest concerns was that we had virtually no money for any TV advertising. We had some radio spots and some posters we sent people out with, but the opponents had a massive advertising budget—at least massive for that time. It would seem trivial today, I guess.

There were two doctrines in communications law. One is Equal Time, which requires television stations to give equal time to candidates; the other is the Fairness Doctrine, which requires that if there is a controversial issue of public importance, the stations have to be fair in their allocation of time and treatment of the issue.

[The Fairness Doctrine was enforced from 1949 to 1987, when the Reagan administration abolished it.]

To my knowledge, the Fairness Doctrine had never been applied to paid advertising before the Prop. 20 campaign. We had produced a wonderful spot in which a San Francisco advertising man named Bud Arnold sat on a stool with a camera on him in a bare studio and said: “I’m Bud Arnold, I’m an advertising man and I think what’s being done by the ‘Vote no on 20’ people is a disgrace to my profession. They want you to believe that you can save the beach by voting no on the proposition to save the beach.” A really beautiful commercial—but we didn’t have any money to get it on television.

So what I did, with the folks in my law firm, was to prepare a petition to the FCC claiming that one of the San Francisco television stations had violated the Fairness Doctrine. Someone on the other side had sympathies with the coast because we got a copy, in an unmarked envelope, of a list of all the opponents’ television buys, station by station. We prepared a petition and attached an exhibit showing all the times that one San Francisco station was running spots, and said we didn’t have money to run any spots. We claimed that the television station had an obligation to run our spots free.

A fellow who had been on the faculty of Boalt Hall [law school] when I was teaching there, Nick Johnson, was head of the FCC. Johnson ruled that there was a violation of the Fairness Doctrine. We got a copy of his order and the next day had volunteers deliver it, together with the Bud Arnold spot, to television stations around the state. Leon Panetta [former White House Chief of Staff] was the volunteer who delivered the copies in Monterey, where he was a lawyer before he ran for Congress. This happened literally a week before the election. During that last week before the election stations throughout California were running our spot free or giving us other kinds of coverage. I remember Channel 2 in Oakland gave us a half-hour program, a kind of town hall meeting in which Janet and Peter Behr and I answered questions from a friendly audience of Coastal Alliance volunteers. So we got a vast amount of television coverage in the last week based on a momentous but little-noticed FCC order.

It was quite exciting to use the power and momentum of the opponent to accomplish your own purpose.

C&O: Superb martial arts practice!

LR: So those were some of the incidents that made 1972 a thrilling year. Proposition 20 was an example of what happens when the legislature is not courageous enough to face a critical issue. If the legislature can’t deal with it, people are likely to do so.

After the passage of the Coastal Initiative and its embodiment in the 1976 California Coastal Act, Lew Reid continued in private practice for another 25 years in San Francisco, but he declined to handle any legal matters that involved the Coastal Commission. All his work for the Alliance had been pro bono. He is now retired in Sonoma County, having served from 1998 through 2000 as president and CEO of the California Endowment, the largest health-related foundation in California. He is now on its board, on the boards of the Sonoma Land Trust and the American Land Conservancy. He is founder and president of the American Society for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.