MENDOCINO CO., 9/24/26 — In 2006, a group of Gualala business and property owners added a 15-minute fireworks show to Patriot Days, the town’s Fourth of July weekend celebration. The fireworks went up near the Gualala River estuary and Gualala Point Island.
Then the phone calls came. People told the California Coastal Commission the fireworks had disturbed seabirds nesting on the island. The commission decided the show was “development” under the Coastal Act and needed a permit.
The Gualala Festivals Committee sued, and lost. A state appeals court ruled in March 2010 that although a fireworks display “may not be a ‘development’ in the ordinary sense of the word,” the commission’s reading fit the law’s broad definition. The state Supreme Court declined to hear the case that June.
The commission lists the Gualala fireworks among the cases it highlights in its own history of the law, which turns 50 on Thursday. The Legislature passed the California Coastal Act on Aug. 23, 1976, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed it Sept. 24.
“The beaches are for all the people,” Brown said when he signed it, according to the commission.
The rulebook
Mendocino County’s Local Coastal Program is the county’s own rulebook for its coastal zone. The commission has to approve it.
The commission approved the county’s land use plan in Sept., 1985, with changes it asked for, and the plan took effect Nov. 20, 1985. The full program, including the rules that carry out the plan, took effect Sept. 10, 1992. A month later, on Oct. 13, 1992, the county took over issuing coastal permits itself.
Highway 1 shaped it. The road’s limited capacity led the commission to significantly reduce how many homes the county’s plan allows on the coast, according to a 2021 commission staff report.
The county’s planning division began work on an update to the program in 2023. Its website says the update is scheduled for completion this year. The pieces it lists include a sea level resilience strategy, visual and archaeological resources, transportation, a coastal groundwater study and biological resources.
What came up this month
The commission met on the North Coast this month, at the Adorni Center in Eureka. On Wednesday, Sept. 9, it signed off on three rule changes from Fort Bragg and Point Arena. Two of them bring local codes in line with state housing law.
One Fort Bragg change is about planned unit development permits. Those let a project bend rules like setbacks, height limits and parking when the result would be a project of “obvious, significantly higher quality,” in the words of the city’s code. The change lowers the minimum site for such a permit from 5 acres to 1. The former Georgia-Pacific mill site keeps the 5-acre minimum.
The other Fort Bragg change carries out Senate Bill 9, a state law in effect since Jan. 1, 2022. It requires local governments to approve splitting a single-family lot in two. On a lot that hasn’t been split, it allows up to four units, two houses plus two accessory units, if the project meets the law’s criteria.
Point Arena’s change replaces its old rules for second units with new rules for accessory dwelling units that follow current state law. Those are extra homes on a residential lot, attached to the main house or standing apart. It also adds rules for emergency shelters, employee housing and density bonuses, which let a qualifying housing project build more units than a property’s zoning would ordinarily allow.
Out on the water
On Dec. 11, 2025, the commission approved, with conditions, Fort Bragg’s application for a 12-month pilot of a wave-powered desalination buoy, the Oneka Iceberg. It is designed to make fresh water from seawater in Mill Bay, about half a mile offshore, with pipelines coming ashore at the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
The trails
The Mendocino Land Trust has accepted 89 public access easements, which it can open as public trails to the coast. That is more than any other nonprofit, according to the land trust. The land trust says the Coastal Commission has given it numerous awards for its work opening trails along the coast.
In 1996 it accepted an easement to open the Mendocino Bay Viewpoint. The land trust says that was the first time a nonprofit in California accepted and opened a public access easement.
Of the 89, it has opened trails on 16, it says.
Fifty years after Brown signed it, the law that required a permit for a Gualala fireworks show still sets the rules on the Mendocino coast, from a lot split in Fort Bragg to an extra home on a Point Arena lot to a desalination buoy in Mill Bay.