Santa Monica Pier is the second most polluted beach in California. The Palisades Fire put lead, arsenic, and beryllium into our bay. Our storm drains fail state health standards on a documented, recurring basis. The Mayor told North of Montana residents this bill is about concert permits. It is not.
By Ashley Oelsen
Part One established how this city secretly co-sponsored AB 1740, how Councilmember Hall testified for it in Sacramento on Earth Day, and how Sacramento named Santa Monica alone among all California coastal cities. Part Two is about the justifications offered, how they were selectively presented, and what the environmental record says about the coastline being handed over.
WHAT THE MAYOR TOLD NORTH OF MONTANA RESIDENTS
On April 2, 2026, Mayor Caroline Torosis appeared before the North of Montana Association via Zoom to discuss AB 1740. The North of Montana neighborhood sits directly adjacent to the coastal zone this bill would deregulate. The residents in that meeting had a direct and material interest in understanding what the bill permits.
What they were told, by multiple accounts of those present, did not include a substantive discussion of the bill's development provisions. There was no explanation of building expansions up to 150% of existing footprint without Commission review. No discussion of density bonus stacking and the towers it could enable on corridors adjacent to their neighborhood. No accounting of the 55-year deed restrictions that make those changes permanent. No mention that the bill had already been amended to apply to Santa Monica alone. What residents heard was a conversation focused on event permitting: the World Cup, the Olympics, the concert permit process. The bill's text authorizes something permanently different.
THE MAYOR'S CONTRADICTIONS, IN HER OWN WORDS
Mayor Torosis, who serves simultaneously as Santa Monica's mayor and as Senior Deputy for LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, has offered two public justifications for AB 1740: coastal event permitting and economic recovery. Both are contradicted by her own documented statements.
At the council meeting where the city approved the Goldenvoice beach festival and Olympic hospitality frameworks, Mayor Torosis said from the dais: These events are taking place in our coastal zone and we can't just set up shop and do them. In the same meeting, she continued: Making sure that we have a streamlined process, if we need to get a local coastal development permit or not, is so important for economic recovery.
In the first statement, she acknowledges that Commission oversight is required. In the second, she frames whether to seek a permit at all as central to economic recovery. The Deputy City Manager resolved the problem she named before she finished naming it: city staff was appearing before the Commission the very morning after that vote to shepherd the World Cup activation through the existing permitting process. The process was working. Economic recovery does not require its removal.
"ECONOMIC RECOVERY" AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANS
The economic recovery framing is the most seductive argument because Santa Monica's financial strain is real. The city faced a projected $29.6 million structural deficit. The Realignment Plan was adopted in October 2025 to address it.
But a temporary deficit does not justify permanent deregulation. The beneficiaries of removing coastal oversight are not Santa Monica's economy in the abstract. They are the specific developers who will build specific projects on specific parcels along Wilshire, Colorado, and Santa Monica Boulevard, projects with 55-year deed restrictions that permanently reshape the coastal zone long after the Olympic revenue has been collected and the structural deficit resolved. The financial pressure that makes economic recovery compelling as a political argument is temporary. The deregulation being offered in its name is not. Trading permanent environmental oversight for a temporary budget problem is not recovery. It is a fire sale of public trust, conducted under time pressure, without a vote.
Mayor Torosis also serves as Senior Deputy for LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell while championing legislation that accelerates coastal development in the city she governs. The county and city have overlapping interests in this coastline. That dual role deserves public disclosure before this bill advances further.
THE CITY HAS NOT EARNED THIS AUTHORITY
Stripped of the events and economic recovery framings, the core claim of AB 1740 is that local control of Santa Monica's coastal zone will produce better outcomes than independent state oversight. The condition of our own shoreline makes that impossible to sustain.
In Heal the Bay's most recent Beach Report Card, Santa Monica Pier ranked second on the statewide list of California's most polluted beaches, trailing only a beach adjacent to a sewage outfall near the Tijuana River. Since 2024, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has issued repeated bacterial advisories at the Pico-Kenter storm drain, the Wilshire Boulevard drain, the Ashland Avenue drain, and the waters surrounding the pier. Stormwater runoff begins in every parking lot, on every rooftop, along every street in the watershed. Every new square foot of impervious surface added to the coastal zone increases the contamination load delivered through the same drains that already cannot meet state bacterial standards. More development above the 300-foot buffer does not stay behind it. The runoff flows beneath it, through concrete pipes, into the water where the county tells families not to swim.
WHAT THE PALISADES FIRE ADDED
The January 2025 Palisades Fire did not stay in the Palisades. What burned entered the watershed. What entered the watershed reached the bay.
Post-fire testing by Heal the Bay at 10 sites across Santa Monica Bay found elevated concentrations of beryllium, copper, chromium, nickel, lead, silver, arsenic, and zinc. PAH concentrations exceeded water quality standards at Topanga and Will Rogers. Heal the Bay was unambiguous: marine mammals, fish populations, and species throughout the food chain remain at serious ongoing risk from bioaccumulation of fire-associated metals. The fire is over. The contamination is not.
The Commission's review process exists to evaluate these cumulative impacts before they become permanent. Removing that review now, in this bay is not a calculated risk. It is an avoidance of accountability.
THE QUESTIONS THAT DEMAND PUBLIC ANSWERS
What specific 2023 council priorities authorized city staff to commit Santa Monica as a named co-sponsor of AB 1740? Who in the City Manager's office made that commitment, under what authority, and when was the full City Council individually informed? Why were residents and environmental organizations not told before this city's name was attached to legislation of this consequence?
Does the City Council endorse a bill naming Santa Monica as the only coastal city in California stripped of Commission protection? Does it support the special statute finding, which is an acknowledgment by the Legislature that this deregulation cannot be justified under any general principle of California law? Why did Mayor Torosis present AB 1740 to North of Montana residents as primarily about event permitting, without substantive discussion of the building expansion, density bonus, and permanent land use provisions that define what the bill actually does?
And to Councilmember Hall directly: you took public credit for bringing Goldenvoice to our beach. City staff was at the Coastal Commission the next morning, using the permit process you flew to Sacramento to dismantle. If the process works for the concert you are proudest of, what exactly are you dismantling it for?
THE WINDOW, AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT
AB 1740 now moves to the Assembly Appropriations Committee, where a fiscal threshold triggers the suspense file, an opaque process in which the committee chair determines which bills survive without a public vote. That is the last significant kill point in the Assembly. After that: a full floor vote requiring 41 of 80 Assembly members, the entire Senate committee and floor process, and Governor Newsom's desk, where he has 12 days to sign, allow passage without signature, or veto.
Assembly Appropriations. The Senate Natural Resources Committee. The Senate Housing Committee. The Governor's office. The only voices Sacramento heard on Earth Day were in favor of this bill. Write. Call. Show up. The bill is advancing. Silence is a vote.
WHAT IS ACTUALLY AT STAKE
In 1990, Santa Monica voters used the initiative process to override a City Council they believed had betrayed the public trust on coastal development. They understood something that is still true: the ocean does not belong to whoever holds office. It belongs to every person who has stood at the water's edge at the end of a hard week, to every child who has run into the surf on this sand, to every marine species that depends on the chemical integrity of Santa Monica Bay, and to every generation that has not yet arrived to inherit what this one chooses to leave behind.
What AB 1740 actually is, by special statute, for this city alone, on a timeline reaching to 2037, is the transfer of one of California's most significant public trusts to the political machinery that spent years engineering the local outcomes that made this transfer possible. The language is borrowed from legitimate goals. The mechanism is not legitimate. The coast that will absorb the consequences has no voice in a city council chamber, no seat on the Appropriations Committee, and no lobbyist in Sacramento.
The window to stop it is open. It will not stay that way. And when it closes, what happens to this coast will belong to everyone who had a chance to speak and chose not to.
Ashley Oelsen is Founder and Executive Director of The Coastal Alliance, a marine conservation nonprofit, and serves as a Commissioner for Environmental Justice, Sustainability and Environment for the City of Santa Monica.