Santa Monica's City Council secretly co-sponsored legislation stripping our coast of independent oversight for a decade. Sacramento amended the bill to name our city alone. No other California coastal community lost its protections. Only ours. Not one resident was asked.
By Ashley Oelsen
On April 22, 2026, as the rest of the country marked Earth Day, California's Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee voted 6 to 0 to advance AB 1740, legislation that would remove independent state oversight from Santa Monica's coastal zone for the next decade. Councilmember Dan Hall made the trip to Sacramento to testify in its favor. He is an elected representative of the people of Santa Monica. He did not represent them. He represented the bill.
This was not a surprise to anyone paying attention. In his first speech from the dais as a newly elected councilmember, Hall specifically thanked Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, the author of AB 1740, as one of the first to believe in me. Streets for All, the political action committee that spent $37,500 backing Hall and his slate in the 2024 council race, is a named co-sponsor of the same bill. The chain from political investment to legislative outcome runs in a straight line: Streets for All backed Hall, Hall won, Hall flew to Sacramento to testify for their bill, authored by the assemblymember he publicly credited on the night of his election. That is not a coincidence.
The contradiction in Hall's own record makes the politics visible. He has publicly taken credit for first proposing the idea of a major music festival for Santa Monica, specifically the Goldenvoice-produced concert planned for the beach south of the pier in fall 2026. That event, which could draw up to 35,000 daily attendees across 12.5 acres of coastal zone, requires California Coastal Commission permits. The city's own deputy city manager confirmed that city staff was appearing before the Commission the morning after the council approved the event framework to begin shepherding the World Cup activation through the permitting process. The permit pathway that Hall's proudest civic achievement requires is the same permit pathway he flew to Sacramento on Earth Day to help dismantle. Either the Coastal Commission process works well enough for the concert he takes credit for, or it does not. It cannot be both.
The broader backstory is worse. Somewhere between a vague set of 2023 council priorities and a February 2026 bill introduction, the City of Santa Monica became a named co-sponsor of legislation that would hand our coastal zone to purely local political control, without an agenda item, without a public vote, and without notifying the residents, business owners, or conservation organizations that have spent generations protecting this stretch of Pacific coastline. City staff, operating on an internal interpretation of council priorities so loosely defined that no resident ever voted on it or read it, attached Santa Monica's name and its Sacramento lobbying resources to AB 1740.
WHAT AB 1740 ACTUALLY DOES TO THIS CITY
AB 1740, introduced by Assemblymember Zbur and co-sponsored by the City of Santa Monica, Streets for All, and Abundant Housing LA, creates a new designation called an urban multimodal community. Cities that qualify, based on transit corridors, bicycle infrastructure, and adopted climate targets, could approve a broad range of coastal zone projects without individual Coastal Commission review.
The exemptions are not narrow. Under this bill, local governments could approve mixed-income multifamily housing in areas already zoned for multifamily use, building renovations and expansions up to 150% of existing footprint, parking restructuring and elimination, bike and bus lane installations, outdoor dining activations, and sweeping transportation infrastructure changes, all without independent Commission oversight. Density bonus law stacking applies on top of all of it, meaning a developer could layer multiple affordability bonuses to reach heights and densities that would never survive Commission scrutiny. The resulting projects carry 55-year deed restrictions and permanent land use changes that no future council can undo.
Picture where this lands. The multifamily-zoned parcels within Santa Monica's coastal zone but outside the bill's narrow 300-foot beach buffer include properties along Wilshire Boulevard, Arizona Avenue, Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica Boulevard, and Broadway into Ocean Park. These are not hypothetical development sites. They are the corridors where Olympic-era construction pressure is already building, where density bonus projects are already in the pipeline, and where the removal of independent state oversight would permanently reshape the scale, character, and environmental footprint of the coast that 93,000 residents share with millions of annual visitors.
Santa Monica almost certainly qualifies as an urban multimodal community under the bill's criteria. City staff has said as much. The entire coastal zone above the 300-foot buffer, in a city that has not had a certified Local Coastal Program Implementation Plan since 1992, would fall under the exclusive control of the same governmental body that co-sponsored the bill eliminating oversight of that control. There is a word for a system in which the regulator and the regulated are the same entity. It is not governance. It is capture.
WHO IS BEHIND THIS, AND WHY IT MATTERS
Streets for All is not a transportation advocacy nonprofit. It operates as a registered 527 political action committee, structured to raise and spend unlimited money electing candidates to local office. In Santa Monica's 2024 council race, Streets for All spent $37,500 backing the slate that now holds council seats and co-sponsored this legislation without a public vote. Streets for All's core agenda is the elimination of surface parking and the reconfiguration of city streets away from cars. Every parking exemption in AB 1740, every provision stripping the Commission of authority over parking ratios and street design within our coastal zone, directly advances that agenda. Their co-sponsorship is the legislative return on a targeted political investment that began at the ballot box.
Abundant Housing LA is the primary lobbying arm of the YIMBY movement in Los Angeles, a 501(c)(4) that advocates for policy and actively backs pro-development candidates for office. It has co-sponsored a string of state bills engineered to override local regulatory barriers to housing near transit, most recently SB 79, which would legalize apartment construction within a half-mile of major transit stops statewide. AB 1740 is the coastal version of that same strategy: strip the independent check, transfer approval authority to local government, and accelerate density. Their executive director described the goal plainly, calling the bill a chance to streamline multifamily housing approvals in existing urbanized areas along California's coast. After April 15, 2026, the coast in question is ours alone.
These are the organizations whose legislative agenda Councilmember Hall flew to Sacramento on Earth Day to advance, in a bill authored by the assemblymember who endorsed him before he had a single vote. The residents of Santa Monica funded that trip. They did not authorize it.
THEN SACRAMENTO NAMED US SPECIFICALLY
On April 15, 2026, AB 1740 was amended so that its permit exemptions apply specifically and exclusively to the City of Santa Monica. The bill's title was changed to read: Coastal resources: coastal development permits: Santa Monica. The amended text requires legislative findings and declarations as to the necessity of a special statute for Santa Monica.
That clause carries constitutional weight. The California Constitution disfavors special legislation targeting a single city when a general law could accomplish the same purpose. When the Legislature singles out one city by name, it must affirmatively declare why no general statute would work. The Legislature included that finding because it has no other choice. No general principle of California law can justify stripping one coastal city of its protections while leaving every other intact. That is a legal admission embedded in the bill itself, signed off on by every legislator who votes yes.
Read the ledger. Malibu keeps its Coastal Commission protection. Venice Beach keeps it. Long Beach, Santa Cruz, Carmel, Half Moon Bay, every city along California's 1,100-mile coast retains the independent oversight that has governed coastal development since the Coastal Act was made permanent in 1976. Only Santa Monica is singled out. Only our coastal zone is transferred to local political control. Only our residents lose the independent check that has kept this shoreline from being handed to whoever holds office in any given election cycle.
The exemptions run to January 1, 2037, covering the entire 2028 Olympic construction cycle and five years of development runway beyond it. This is not a pilot program or a cautious modernization. It is a decade-long window for one specific coastline, constructed without a vote of the people who live on it, advanced by officials who did not tell them it was coming, and passed on Earth Day by a committee that heard no organized opposition because the residents whose coast was on the agenda did not know the hearing was happening.
Part Two examines the Mayor's contradictory public statements, her selective presentation to North of Montana residents, the economic recovery argument and what it actually means, the environmental science that makes this deregulation indefensible, and the closing window to stop AB 1740.