CUTTING COASTAL RESILIENCE FUNDING IS DAFT

Warnings about climate change leading to rising oceans that flood Southern California coastal areas — and accelerate the erosion of beaches and coastal bluffs — date back at least to the early 1990s.

Now — even though the worst perils of the climate emergency appear years off — erosion already looms as a multibillion-dollar nightmare in the Golden State. On March 16, after the latest in a series of storms that have soaked much of the state since December, four apartment buildings with 20 units in a densely packed neighborhood just north of the San Clemente Pier were declared off-limits and their residents evacuated after a landslide rendered them unsafe. On Feb. 28, a large bluff collapsed in Del Mar near 4th Street, bringing the edge of a cliff perilously close to train tracks. Passenger train service between San Diego and Orange counties had already been disrupted since Sept. 30 because of recurring landslides in San Clemente. And while recent scary incidents have not led to the loss of any lives — such as the August 2019 collapse of a bluff at Grandview Beach in Encinitas, which killed three women from the same family — such tragedies feel inevitable. That's especially so with spring beginning this week with yet another round of intense rain throughout the region.

This backdrop — and what it portends for much more of the California coast in coming years — is what makes a March 8 story by CalMatters so unnerving. It provided one of the more detailed looks yet at how Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to eliminate a $22.5 billion shortfall the state expects in the budget year starting July 1. Coastal resilience programs took one of the biggest hits on a percentage basis. Newsom proposed reducing annual spending from $1.295 billion to $734 million, a 43 percent cut.

Especially given how the state Legislative Analyst's Office and other authorities have shown that investing in climate resilience efforts now will pay huge dividends in future years, this cut is hard to fathom. But when the proposed cut is considered in tandem with the fact that the governor wants to keep spending billions more on the state's doomed bullet-train project — the worst public works debacle in California history, with almost no notable progress in 15 years — it should yield a different emotion than incredulity: anger. It's as if the head of a household decided to keep trying to repair a hopelessly broken car instead of paying for a sick child's medical care. It's time for other state leaders to stage an intervention with Gavin Newsom and make this point as vociferously as possible.