BILL ANALYSIS
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| SENATE COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND WATER |
| Senator Fran Pavley, Chair |
| 2009-2010 Regular Session |
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BILL NO: SB 1488 HEARING DATE: April 13, 2010
AUTHOR: Natural Resources and WaterURGENCY: No
VERSION: As introduced CONSULTANT: Katharine Moore
DUAL REFERRAL: No FISCAL: Yes
SUBJECT: State lands: tidelands and submerged lands.
BACKGROUND AND EXISTING LAW
This is the State Lands Commission (SLC) omnibus committee bill.
The SLC exercises the state's ongoing oversight authority over
all of the state's public trust lands. These include filled and
unfilled tide and other submerged lands as well as the beds of
navigable rivers, lakes and streams. These lands cannot be
bought or sold but the state's administrative authority to
manage them may be granted by the Legislature to local agencies,
subject to the public trust, for specific uses of statewide
benefit. The public trust is a set of guiding principles that
direct the state to hold its title to public trust lands in a
manner to protect the public's interest in activities that are
typically water dependent or related. While continually
evolving to meet changing public needs, these activities
include, for example, navigation, commerce, fishing, recreation
and environmental protection. The Legislature has been making
grants of these lands since the state's inception.
In 2006, the City of Pittsburg sponsored AB 2324 (Canciamilla,
c. 275, Stats. 2006) which replaced several existing legislative
grants of tide and other submerged lands to the city with a
single grant subject to the public trust and certain other
provisions. Pittsburg sought the legislation in order to
simplify the development plans of its port, speed clean-up of
contaminated industrial areas, boost its economic growth and
create jobs.
The SLC is also the trustee of the Land Bank Fund (LBF) created
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pursuant to the Kapiloff Land Bank Act of 1982. There are
certain restrictions on the LBF's operation. The LBF may
receive funds from:
Title settlements which may be used to purchase specific
LBF parcels and the conveyance of those interests to the
state,
Project applicants for the purposes of mitigation, and
Any party for projects to provide for the management and
improvement of real property held by the SLC to provide
open space, habitat and public access.
PROPOSED LAW
This bill would modify the Public Resources Code to:
i. Require a survey of the trust lands granted to the
City of Pittsburg in 2006 be completed by January 1, 2013
and exclude Brown's Island from the same grant.
ii. Allow the Land Bank Fund
to be used to create access to public trust lands.
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ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT
The proposed bill addresses two items of concern to the State
Lands Commission which, if passed, will improve its ability to
meet its public land management and resource protection goals.
ARGUMENTS IN OPPOSITION
None received
COMMENTS
Changes needed in the grant of public tidelands and submerged
lands to the City of Pittsburg: No survey was required in the
grant to the City of Pittsburg provided that it "established a
metes and bounds description of the trustee's corporate water
boundaries." This was atypical and the grant boundaries have
not yet been reported. The new survey requirement will force
the boundaries to be assessed and reported to the SLC. After
the grant was made, subsequent discussions between the City of
Pittsburg and the SLC revealed that Brown's Island - which is
partly under the jurisdiction of the Port of Stockton - should
not have been included.
The rationale to expand eligibility for Land Bank Fund projects:
In some instances, the best way to improve trust lands is to
allow the public to access them in order to participate in
water-related recreation, navigation and other trust activities.
Access to the trust lands may be provided by, for example, the
addition of a wheelchair ramp, staircase, path or trail, among
other methods. Often these improvements have to be built on
non-trust lands, such as the land between a road and a beach.
It is not clear that LBF funds can be spent on projects located
on non-trust lands. In order to address this obstacle, the
proposed change in the law broadens project eligibility to
include "access to." This would allow, for example, the SLC to
use LBF funds to build a stairway from an upland road to a beach
on trust lands in partnership with the owner of the non-trust
lands (typically a public entity). The SLC has assured staff
that it is interested only in cooperative projects with
non-trust land owners and will not assert eminent domain
(existing law prohibits the use of eminent domain under the
Kapiloff Land Bank Act (see PRC 8620)).
SUPPORT
State Lands Commission
OPPOSITION
None Received
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