Unelected state bureaucrats are destroying our family home of 50 years—voiding our ability to do basic and necessary maintenance on our own property.
Let me explain.
Every year, our property—along with other properties in Cannon Beach, Oregon—gets slowly inundated with tens of tons of sand from the beach. This accumulated sand necessitates a property dig-out once a year, in which we move accumulated sand back onto the beach. Without this, our property would slowly become buried in sand over the course of just a few years. This is a problem our family has been managing since the 1960s, and we are more than capable and willing to deal with it. Every year, we get a permit from the city to get an excavation team to move the accumulated sand.
As such, for decades, we responsibly perform this routine dig-out ON OUR OWN DIME with permission of the city and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department (ORPD) once per year. This is not new. This is not experimental. This is a tradition rooted in necessity, understood by the local community, and permitted for decades.
One of the most important impacts of our long-standing dig-out is something many visitors never realize. On top of our own property, we dig out the local public beach access walkway ensuring that everyone has accessible and safe access to the beach. Our annual work has helped protect and preserve safe coastal access for everyone, including mobility-impaired visitors. Smoothing the sand next to our property has made it one of the most accessible routes to the beach and famous Haystack Rock. Meanwhile, other public access points have become steep, buried, or completely unusable. Our privately funded work has quietly created a public benefit for decades, at no cost to the state.
But last year, everything changed without warning. Despite receiving another city permit to dig, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, with direction from Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD), circumnavigated the City of Cannon Beach and denied our ability to dig—which now makes it a CRIME to dig sand out of our own property.
From our perspective, this abrupt reversal defies logic and ignores the reality of the situation unfolding on the ground; it is a death sentence not only to our family’s home but to many other beachfront properties in Cannon Beach.
Knowing that this was a matter of life or death for the house, and because we love this house, we chose to appeal and fight this inexplicable decision in whatever way we could. For the last 10 months, we’ve been in a legal dispute with OPRD over this issue, trying to regain our right to maintain our property.
This legal dispute has been a nightmare. The back and forth with the state has been mired in incompetency. They’ve caused procedural delays and have offered shifting explanations, conflicting interpretations, and reasoning that does not align with our town’s established understanding of its own shoreline. Based on our experience, it feels like the agencies involved do not fully understand the unique coastal conditions or the decades of precedent behind this work.
It also increasingly feels as though the state is dragging this process out as long as possible, hoping that we will simply give up under the financial and emotional weight of this fight. We’ve had to spend enormous amounts of money on legal fees to fight this battle in court, and it’s been dragged out so much that we’re running out of money. Their added obstacles and drawn-out process make it difficult to see this as anything other than an attempt to exhaust us. Deep down, we feel that they know the facts are not on their side.
Meanwhile, the sand continues to climb. Our front yard is now buried, and if this keeps up, our home of 50 years will be buried and rendered unlivable.
This is also a precedent being set that could impact every homeowner along the Oregon coast. This is no longer a simple permitting issue. From where we stand, it has become a troubling example of state agencies overreaching and disregarding local expertise and common-sense solutions that cost the state nothing.
All of this is happening while OPRD faces a $14 million budget shortfall. Instead of allowing responsible, privately funded solutions that improve accessibility for the public, they are spending taxpayer money (that they don’t even have!) to prevent a family from responsibly maintaining their property and local beach walkways.
We need help. We need the public to understand what is happening before our home suffers permanent damage and before this issue spreads across Oregon’s coastal communities. We are calling for press coverage, public awareness, and help from Oregon’s leadership. Please help us shine a light on this.
Tagging for urgent attention and help:
@TinaKotek @OregonHouseGOP @ORDems @WeberforOregon @CyrusforOregon @ORSecretaryRead @KATUNews @Oregonian @fox12oregon @KOINNews @SenJeffMerkley