The Agency That Investigates You Also Convicts You, Fines You, and Keeps the Money
Imagine you own a home along the California coast. One day, the California Coastal Commission opens an enforcement investigation against you. It assigns its own staff to investigate. Those same staff recommend charges. The Commission holds a hearing where it decides whether you violated the law. It then imposes a fine. And the proceeds flow back to an account the agency controls.
You had no jury. No neutral judge. No meaningful opportunity to contest the charges before an independent tribunal. Just an agency that was, at every stage of the process, playing all sides of the table.
For thousands of coastal property owners in California, this isn’t a hypothetical. It’s the Coastal Commission’s standard enforcement model. And in 2025 and 2026, it’s finally being challenged in federal court as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process guarantee.
Two separate federal lawsuits, both filed in the last year, are now pressing the argument that the Commission’s in-house enforcement structure is constitutionally defective. A third case challenges the Commission’s practice of using permit approvals as leverage to coerce property owners into surrendering rights they can never recover. Together, they represent the most direct constitutional challenge to the Commission’s operating model in decades.
How the Commission’s Enforcement Power Grew
Understanding the due process problem requires understanding how the Commission’s enforcement authority actually works today, because it wasn’t always this way.
When the California Coastal Commission was created in 1972, it had no power to fine property owners directly. Alleged violations of the Coastal Act had to go to state court. That meant a neutral judge presided, normal rules of evidence applied, and the accused was presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
That changed in 2014, when the state legislature granted the Commission authority to assess administrative penalties directly, up to $11,250 per day per violation. In 2021, the legislature expanded that authority again, extending the per-day penalty to any violation of the Coastal Act, not just those involving public beach access.
The result: as documented in a Pacific Legal Foundation report on the Commission’s enforcement activity, the Commission has collected nearly $50 million from property owners between 2016 and the mid-2020s. Those penalties flow into the Violation Remediation Account, a state fund that can be used to support public coastal access, education, and operations. PLF, representing Levy, characterises this arrangement as fines the agency’s director can use at his discretion, and argues the institutional financial interest it creates is precisely what makes the Commission’s in-house adjudication constitutionally defective.
The Commission now investigates alleged violations using its own staff, prosecutes property owners before itself, adjudicates those cases through its own hearing process, and retains revenue from the fines it imposes. That three-in-one structure is precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause is designed to address.
The Levy Case: More Than $2 Million in Fines Without a Jury Trial
In November 2025, John Levy, a waterfront homeowner in Carlsbad, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Commission’s enforcement model head-on.
As documented in the Levy v. California Coastal Commission case page, the Commission imposed more than $2 million in combined penalties on Levy across multiple enforcement orders, alleging that he was blocking public beach access and maintaining unauthorized structures on his property, including a gate that the City of Carlsbad had itself approved years earlier. The Commission conducted its investigation internally, brought charges through its own staff, held a hearing before its own members, and issued the penalties without providing Levy a jury trial or the other procedural protections that courts ordinarily require before the government imposes ruinous financial consequences of that magnitude.
Levy’s lawsuit makes two related constitutional arguments. First, that the Commission’s in-house enforcement structure violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process guarantee because the agency serves simultaneously as prosecutor, judge, and financial beneficiary of the fines it imposes. Second, that before the government imposes multi-million-dollar punitive penalties, it must provide meaningful procedural safeguards, including the opportunity for an independent tribunal to hear the case.
The due process argument in Levy draws on a well-established constitutional principle: a tribunal that has a financial stake in its own decisions cannot provide a fair hearing. The U.S. Supreme Court has held for nearly a century that a judge with even a small financial interest in the outcome of a case violates due process. The Commission, by contrast, receives the fines it imposes as revenue. The structural conflict isn’t subtle.
The case also arrives in a legal environment where in-house agency enforcement is under renewed constitutional scrutiny. In SEC v. Jarkesy (2024), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Securities and Exchange Commission violated the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial by adjudicating civil penalties through its own in-house proceedings rather than in federal court. One important limitation applies to its use in state cases: the Seventh Amendment has never been incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, so Jarkesy is persuasive rather than binding on California proceedings. State enforcement challenges must instead rely on due process principles under the Fourteenth Amendment, state constitutional protections, or separation-of-powers doctrines. That is precisely the ground Levy occupies. Rather than invoking Jarkesy directly, Levy grounds his challenge in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, arguing that the Commission’s structural conflict as prosecutor, judge, and financial beneficiary independently violates the constitutional guarantee of a fair and impartial hearing, regardless of whether a jury trial is also required.
The Seidensticker Case: Surrender Your Rights or We Won’t Let You Rebuild
The second active federal lawsuit raises a different, but equally serious, constitutional challenge.
John and Marcella Seidensticker have lived in a condo in Dana Point for decades. They want to replace their aging home on Beach Road with a larger, safer, modern structure. The City of Dana Point reviewed their plans and approved the project without objection.
Then two members of the Coastal Commission appealed the city’s decision to the full Commission in February 2023. The Commission left the Seidenstickers in limbo for over three years. When it finally held a hearing in March 2026, it imposed 15 special conditions on their permit. As detailed in the Seidensticker v. California Coastal Commission press release, those conditions included:
- A requirement that the Seidenstickers submit entirely new development plans to the Commission, to be approved by the Commission’s unelected executive director
- A requirement to fund regular government surveys of the area at their own expense
- A permanent waiver of their right to protect their home against storm damage or coastal erosion
- An agreement to “promptly” demolish “all or a portion of” their home whenever any government agency asked them to, with no right to challenge the demand in court
That last condition is worth pausing on. The Commission required the Seidenstickers, as a condition of rebuilding their own home on their own property, to surrender their constitutional right to contest government demands in court. If any agency, at any point in the future, decided it wanted the home demolished, the Seidenstickers would have pre-agreed to comply. No hearing. No challenge. No due process.
The constitutional principle being violated here is known as the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. The government can legitimately regulate what you do with your property. What it cannot do is use its permitting power to extract waivers of constitutional rights as the price of approval. A permit condition that requires you to give up the right to challenge government action is not a legitimate exercise of regulatory authority. It’s coercion.
On May 7, 2026, the Seidenstickers filed their federal lawsuit challenging the Commission’s conditions. Their case sits at the intersection of due process, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and the Nollan/Dolan essential nexus and rough proportionality framework that limits what the government can demand from permit applicants.
The Seawall Waiver Policy: A Third Line of Constitutional Attack
The Levy and Seidensticker cases are not isolated incidents. They are part of a broader pattern that the Coastal Rights Coalition v. California Coastal Commission case has been challenging directly.
Since 2010, the Commission has required property owners seeking permits to build new homes, or substantially redevelop existing homes, in the coastal zone to permanently waive their right to build any shoreline protective device. Seawalls, rip-rap, and other erosion protection measures protect coastal homes from storms and bluff collapse. The Coastal Act expressly recognizes the right of property owners to protect their homes with these structures. Yet the Commission has, as a standard condition of new development permits, required property owners to agree in advance that they will never exercise that right.
If the house is eventually threatened by coastal erosion, the owners must tear it down. They cannot protect it. They gave up that right when they accepted the permit.
The Coastal Rights Coalition challenge attacks this policy primarily under the California Administrative Procedure Act, arguing the seawall waiver was an unlawful underground regulation: a binding new policy imposed by agency fiat, without the public notice, comment period, and hearings that California law requires before an agency can adopt such a rule. This distinguishes it from the Fourteenth Amendment due process argument in Levy and the unconstitutional conditions claim in Seidensticker, though the three cases together illuminate every dimension of the Commission’s overreach: how it enforces, how it conditions permits, and how it makes policy without legal authority to do so.
What Is Procedural Due Process and Why Does It Apply Here?
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. This protection has two branches. Substantive due process limits what the government can do to you regardless of the procedures it uses. Procedural due process addresses how the government treats you when it takes action that affects your life, liberty, or property.
The Commission’s enforcement model implicates procedural due process at its core. When a government agency seeks to impose a fine, the due process clause requires, at minimum, that the person facing the penalty receive notice of the charges, an opportunity to be heard, and a decision from a neutral decision-maker. Neutrality is essential. An adjudicator with a financial stake in the outcome, or one that has already participated in investigating and prosecuting the case being adjudicated, cannot provide the impartial hearing that due process demands.
The Commission fails the neutrality requirement in at least two ways. First, it functions as both prosecutor and judge. The staff who investigate and recommend charges are part of the same agency that conducts the hearing and decides the outcome. Second, the fines flow back to an account that funds the agency’s operations. The Commission has an institutional financial interest in the fines it imposes, a structural conflict that courts have long recognized as a due process problem.
The unconstitutional conditions claims in Seidensticker and Coastal Rights Coalition implicate a related but distinct strand of constitutional doctrine. The permit conditions in those cases don’t deprive property owners of money. They deprive them of constitutional rights. Under well-established doctrine, the government cannot condition a benefit, including a permit, on the surrender of constitutional rights. The price of building your home cannot be the permanent forfeiture of your right to protect it or your right to challenge government action in court.
This Is Not New Criticism: Kassouni Law Has Said This for Years
What is now being litigated in federal court is something that attorneys who have spent careers challenging the Commission’s conduct have known for a long time.
In “The Unrepentant Sins of the California Coastal Commission,” published in the Sacramento Daily Recorder in 2009, Timothy Kassouni described the Commission as an agency that continuously expands its jurisdiction and power, imposing conditions and demanding concessions that go far beyond what any legitimate interpretation of the Coastal Act authorizes. In a companion article, “The Cost of Wetlands in Half Moon Bay,” published in 2008, the firm documented how the Commission uses its regulatory authority to extract concessions from private property owners that bear no reasonable relationship to the impacts of the proposed development.
The due process cases now in federal court are, in a meaningful sense, the litigation embodiment of what those articles identified: an agency that has been operating outside the constitutional bounds of its authority for decades, with courts largely going along because no one had yet framed the structural challenge in terms courts could directly engage.
That framing now exists. The question courts will have to answer in Levy, Seidensticker, and Coastal Rights Coalition is whether an agency that is simultaneously investigator, prosecutor, judge, and financial beneficiary can provide the due process that the Fourteenth Amendment requires. If the answer is no, the Commission will have to fundamentally restructure how it handles enforcement. If the answer is yes, the next question becomes what other challenges are available to property owners who have already been fined or coerced into surrendering rights.
What Remedies Are Available to Coastal Property Owners?
For property owners who are currently facing Commission enforcement, or who accepted permit conditions under duress, several avenues remain open depending on the specific circumstances.
Federal constitutional claims under Section 1983. A property owner whose Fourteenth Amendment due process rights have been violated by a state agency can bring a claim in federal court under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, which creates a private right of action for violations of constitutional rights by state actors. The Coastal Commission is a state agency. Its enforcement actions are state actions. The due process violations Levy and the Seidenstickers allege are precisely the kind of constitutional violations Section 1983 was designed to remedy.
Challenging permit conditions as unconstitutional takings. Where the Commission has imposed permit conditions that require the surrender of property rights, including seawall waivers or demolition agreements, those conditions may be challengeable as unconstitutional takings under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. After Sheetz v. County of El Dorado (2024), legislative and administrative permit conditions alike must satisfy the Nollan/Dolan essential nexus and rough proportionality tests. A condition that requires permanent waiver of the right to protect your home cannot be proportionate to the impact of building it.
Writ of administrative mandate. A property owner who has already received a Commission enforcement order or permit denial can challenge the agency’s decision in state court through a petition for writ of administrative mandate. The standard of review in a writ proceeding can, in appropriate cases, require the court to exercise independent judgment rather than simply deferring to the Commission’s findings.
Challenging jurisdiction before engaging the merits. As the Shear Development ruling confirmed, the Commission’s appellate jurisdiction over locally approved permits depends on a legal question that courts now review independently. A property owner who has received notice that the Commission intends to appeal a locally issued permit should immediately assess whether the Commission’s claimed jurisdictional basis is legally valid before engaging the merits of the underlying project.
The Constitutional law practice at Kassouni Law and the firm’s work in Civil Rights cases involving government violations both speak directly to the intersection where these Coastal Commission challenges land. Constitutional property rights and civil liberties are not separate doctrines when a government agency uses its permitting and enforcement powers to deprive people of property, rights, and fair process in the same action.
A Pattern, Not a Series of Accidents
What emerges from Levy, Seidensticker, and Coastal Rights Coalition together is not a picture of isolated overreach in individual cases. It’s a picture of an agency that has systematically used its administrative enforcement power to impose penalties without independent adjudication, and used its permitting power to extract surrenders of constitutional rights as a condition of approval.
That pattern was predictable. An agency given broad authority, immune from most judicial scrutiny, collecting revenue from the fines it imposes on the people it regulates, will tend over time to push against every limit on that authority. The Commission has been pushing for fifty years.
The federal courts are now being asked to draw those limits. For coastal property owners across California, whether they’re facing a multimillion-dollar fine, a set of conditions that requires them to waive their rights to keep their home, or a permit appeal they never invited, the answer to whether those limits hold will define what it means to own property along the California coast.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can the California Coastal Commission fine me without giving me a jury trial or hearing?
Currently, yes. The Commission has authority under California law to impose administrative penalties of up to $11,250 per day per violation through its own in-house enforcement process. It investigates, prosecutes, and adjudicates cases using its own staff and members, without providing property owners a jury trial or an independent tribunal. That process is now being challenged in Levy v. California Coastal Commission as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process guarantee. The lawsuit argues that an agency that serves as prosecutor, judge, and financial beneficiary of the fines it imposes cannot provide the impartial hearing that due process requires.
What is a Fourteenth Amendment due process claim and how does it apply to Coastal Commission enforcement?
The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. When a government agency seeks to impose a substantial fine, procedural due process requires, at minimum, notice of the charges, a meaningful opportunity to be heard, and a decision from a neutral and disinterested adjudicator. The Commission’s enforcement model fails the neutrality requirement because the agency participates in investigating and prosecuting cases and then adjudicates them in-house, while also retaining financial benefit from the penalties it imposes. A decision-maker with a financial stake in the outcome cannot provide the impartial hearing due process demands.
Can the Coastal Commission require me to demolish my home or waive my coastal protection rights as a condition of getting a permit?
It has been doing so for years, but those conditions are now being challenged in court as unconstitutional. The unconstitutional conditions doctrine prohibits the government from using its permitting power to extract waivers of constitutional rights as the price of approval. In Seidensticker v. California Coastal Commission, a Dana Point couple is challenging conditions that required them to permanently waive their right to protect their home from erosion and to agree to demolish it on demand from any government agency. In Coastal Rights Coalition v. California Coastal Commission, a broader challenge targets the Commission’s practice of requiring all new coastal development permit applicants to permanently waive their right to build seawall protection.
What is the difference between a Coastal Commission fine and an eminent domain taking?
Eminent domain is the government’s power to take private property for public use, with just compensation required under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. A Coastal Commission fine is an administrative penalty for an alleged violation of the Coastal Act. They are legally distinct mechanisms, but the constitutional concerns overlap significantly. Both can deprive property owners of substantial value. Both require procedural protections before being imposed. And both can, in appropriate circumstances, constitute a taking requiring just compensation if the government’s action goes far enough. Permit conditions that require permanent surrender of property rights, such as seawall waivers or advance demolition agreements, blur the line between regulation and taking, which is one reason they are being challenged on both due process and takings grounds simultaneously.
How do I challenge a California Coastal Commission enforcement action or fine?
The options depend on where in the process you are. If the Commission has opened an investigation or scheduled a hearing, the time to raise procedural objections and preserve your record is now, before the hearing, not after. If the Commission has already issued a fine or permit condition, you may be able to challenge it through a writ of administrative mandate in state court or, where constitutional rights are at stake, through a federal lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. If the Commission is appealing a locally approved permit, assess the jurisdictional basis immediately. Speaking with a coastal property rights attorney who understands the Commission’s enforcement structure and the constitutional framework now being litigated is the critical first step.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created by reading this content. Contact Kassouni Law for a consultation regarding your specific situation. Past results do not guarantee similar outcomes.
