Councilmember Hall opened his response to my op-eds with a paragraph cataloguing my organizational affiliations. His goal was clear: frame me as a political actor, not a credible critic. What he left out is telling. He omitted that I serve as a Commissioner on the City of Santa Monica's own Commission for Sustainability, Environmental Justice, and the Environment and served as Chair of the Clean Oceans and Beaches Measure V Oversight Committee. He also omitted that I hold degrees in environmental science and environmental policy, with specialized academic focus in biodiversity and wildlife conservation. These are not peripheral credentials. They are directly relevant to evaluating the ecological claims at the center of this debate. Councilmember Hall chose to list the affiliations that make me look partisan and erase the qualifications that make me look knowledgeable. Readers should weigh that choice accordingly.
Now to his substance.
Where I agree with Councilmember Hall. Outdoor dining parklets, temporary events, and routine commercial permitting changes should not require lengthy Coastal Commission review. That process imposes real costs on small businesses and contributes nothing meaningful to coastal protection. If AB 1740 were limited to those categories, this would be a much shorter conversation. It is not. The bill's exemptions extend well beyond that, and the outdoor dining rationale is being used to provide political cover for a much broader removal of state oversight. Conceding the easy cases does not validate the hard ones.
On transparency and process. Mayor Torosis has argued that the Legislature moves quickly and the City had to act fast. Public records tell a different story. City staff was engaged in active coalition-building around this legislation as early as June 2025. City of Santa Monica Chief Planning Officer Jason Kligier reached out to Long Beach staff in June 2025 specifically to discuss "potential collaboration in a coalition to advocate for improvements in the process" with the Coastal Commission. The bill was not formally introduced until February 2026. The City had roughly eight months, not days, to bring a co-sponsorship decision of this magnitude before the full Council for a public vote. It chose not to.
This matters because the City of Santa Monica co-sponsors very few bills. The last co-sponsorship before AB 1740 was in 2023, and one before that in 2022. This is not a routine administrative action. It is an exceptional exercise of the City's institutional credibility and political capital, and exceptional actions warrant exceptional public deliberation. They did not get it. Mayor Torosis has since confirmed as much on the record. At the NOMA neighborhood meeting on April 2, 2026, she stated that waiting two or three weeks to bring something to the full Council "actually slows down our ability to be impactful in the legislative process." The Mayor of Santa Monica has publicly explained that the reason the Council did not vote on this co-sponsorship is that a council vote would have been inconvenient. That is not a defense of the process. That is a description of what was wrong with it.
The internal communications reinforce this picture. When the bill was formally introduced in February 2026, Legislative Affairs Liaison Josh Kurpies sent a memo to Council advising staff and elected officials to hold off on outreach, coordinate all messaging in advance with Zbur's office and co-sponsors, and alert staff if outside organizations made contact seeking to discuss the bill. Kurpies himself acknowledged the bill's "complexity and sensitivity" and the need to avoid straining the City's ongoing relationship with the Coastal Commission. That is not the language of a routine legislative update. It is the language of managed political communications around a decision the City knew was controversial. Staff understood the sensitivity. Rather than bring that controversy to the public, the City managed the rollout. That is not transparency. That is its opposite.
On the collaboration denial. Hall says he did not collaborate with Streets for All or Abundant Housing LA in drafting the bill. The emails show something more integrated than that framing suggests. City staff participated in weekly sponsor check-in calls alongside Streets for All, Abundant Housing LA, and Zbur's office beginning within days of the bill's introduction, with calls scheduled through September 2026. City staff worked alongside outside lobbyists to arrange meetings with the League of Cities to build support. When Zbur's office circulated a supporter outreach spreadsheet with instructions that it be kept "for internal use only" and not shared outside the sponsorship group, Josh Kurpies was on that distribution list. The City's outside lobbyist drafted the sponsor support letter. City staff asked Zbur's office to soften language in advocacy materials that implied city negligence over the preferential parking delay, and the language was revised accordingly. Hall says he did not collaborate in "drafting." The emails show city staff as active participants in shaping the bill's messaging, building its coalition, and advancing its political strategy. Readers can decide what to call that.
On the environmental argument. On April 22, Councilmember Hall sat next to Assemblymember Zbur at a legislative hearing while Zbur made the following statement about Santa Monica: "If these activities were taking place in a sensitive ecosystem, they might pose a real environmental threat. But in a built-out city, they have no impact on coastal resources or public access. This bill now only applies to Santa Monica and urban built out city with robust public transit and will preserve the California Coastal Commission's authority and ability to protect beaches and coastal resources from activities that threaten sensitive habitats, including in Santa Monica, to the extent that there are any."
Councilmember Hall said nothing. He raised no objection to the suggestion that Santa Monica may have no sensitive coastal habitats worth protecting. He offered no correction. He sat in silence while the bill's author publicly framed the ecological sensitivity of our coastline as an open question with an implied improbability, rather than a documented fact. That silence is now part of the record.
It should not go uncorrected. Santa Monica's shoreline supports federally protected nesting grounds for the western snowy plover and the California least tern. Active dune restoration is creating new coastal habitat that requires science-based, independent oversight to survive. These are not hypothetical or marginal concerns. They are federally documented, actively managed, and directly within the footprint of the area AB 1740 would remove from Coastal Commission review. The phrase "to the extent that there are any" is not a legal qualifier. It is a factual error, stated publicly, by the bill's author, in support of legislation that Santa Monica's own elected representative chose not to dispute.
The water quality picture compounds this. Santa Monica Bay is experiencing chronic bacterial exceedances at storm drain outfalls during dry weather, indicating persistent structural contamination rather than episodic storm events. Post-fire testing has identified elevated metals and toxic compounds in coastal waters with ongoing bioaccumulation risk. The City remains out of compliance with stormwater discharge requirements. Its Local Coastal Program Implementation Plan remains uncertified. AB 1740 removes oversight without resolving any of these underlying conditions. It is not streamlining. It is exempting a city from state scrutiny at the precise moment that scrutiny is most necessary.
Hall asks readers to "Read the bill." Reading the bill is exactly how you discover that its exemptions are defined by the City itself, reviewed under a local framework not certified under the Coastal Act, and subject to none of the independent scientific analysis the Coastal Commission would otherwise provide. The Commission exists precisely because local governments have historically been unreliable stewards of their own coastlines. That history did not happen elsewhere. It happened here.
On the LCP argument. Hall is technically correct that Santa Monica still needs a certified LCP. But AB 1740 reduces the City's incentive to get one. The pressure points that were driving the negotiation, including the parking districts, the bike lanes, and the commercial renovations and temporary events, are now resolved by legislative exemption. Why complete a difficult negotiation when the Legislature has handed you a carve-out for the parts you found most inconvenient? The LCP process will not accelerate under AB 1740. It will stall further, with the City holding less motivation than before to reach consensus with the Commission.
On precedent AB 1740 is no longer a general policy proposal. As amended, it applies only to Santa Monica. That makes it a special statute: a targeted legislative carve-out for one city's convenience rather than a principled statewide reform. Internal City emails show staff identified 18 cities across 6 counties that might eventually qualify under the bill's criteria. If this model takes hold, other cities will seek the same exemption. California's coastal protections depend on consistency and a uniform regulatory floor that does not bend city by city. AB 1740 introduces a crack in that floor. The question is not whether Santa Monica is uniquely trustworthy. The question is what precedent we have now established for everyone else..
On the housing argument. Hall argues that opposing coastal infill is environmentally irresponsible because it pushes development to wildfire-interface hillsides. That may be true as a general housing policy matter. It is not what AB 1740 is primarily about. The bill's own fact sheet explicitly lists rooftop uses, change-of-use approvals, outdoor dining, temporary events, and parking management among its exemptions. Invoking climate and wildfire risk to defend those exemptions is not an environmental argument. It is misdirection.
Reasonable people can disagree about coastal permitting reform. Those disagreements should happen in public, with full scientific analysis, with the communities most affected at the table, and through a statewide approach that does not trade the protection of one of California's most ecologically stressed coastlines for a local economic recovery strategy built on eight months of behind-the-scenes coalition work the public was never invited into.
AB 1740 does not do that. The record shows what it does and how it was built.
That is not fearmongering. That is the public record.
One final note. Councilmember Hall took it upon himself to inform readers that I am an unannounced candidate for Santa Monica City Council. I had not planned to make any announcement. But Councilmember Hall has a way of clarifying things.
AB 1740 would hand Santa Monica's city council the power to reshape our coastal zone without Coastal Commission oversight. Parking, access, infrastructure, commercial development, all of it decided locally, by the same body that spent eight months building a legislative coalition around this bill without ever asking the public what it thought. That arrangement is only acceptable if residents can trust their council to act in the public interest rather than the interest of the organizations that fund their campaigns and staff their advocacy networks.
Right now, based on the record this bill has produced, residents cannot. And if Councilmember Hall wanted to make the case that Santa Monica needs new voices on its council, he could not have written a more effective argument than the one he published this morning.
I will let that speak for itself.