(b) "coastal waters" means the areas of the Great Lakes within the U.S. territorial jurisdic- "coastal state” means a state bordering the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound, or a Great Lake, and includes Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. (d) "estuary" means that part of a river or stream or other water body having connection with the open sea, where sea water is diluted with fresh water from land drainage, including Great Lakes estuaries. (e) “estuarine sanctuary" means a research area including all or part of an estuary, adjoining transitional areas, and adjacent uplands, constituting to the extent feasible a natural unit. (f) (g) "secretary" means the Secretary of Commerce. "Management program” includes a comprehensive statement prepared and adopted by the state setting forth objectives, policies, and standards to guide public and private uses of lands and waters in the coastal zone. (h) "water use" means activities conducted on the water, but does not include establishment of water quality standards or criteria or regulation of discharge or runoff of water pollutants. (i)"land use” means activities conducted on the shorelands within the coastal zone. Three major sections of the Act laid out its primary techniques and concepts. These included initial grants to "develop" management programs for federal approval under Section 305, follow-up grants to "administer" or implement these approved programs under Section 306, and a requirement that federal actions be "consistent" with approved state coastal management programs under Section 307. Section 305 of the Act defined Management Program Development Grants. These initial grants could cover up to two-thirds of the costs of program development over a 3-year period. Management programs had to include: 2. Definition of permissible land and water uses within the coastal zone. 4. Identification of means by which state control is proposed to be exerted over land and water uses, including constitutional provisions, legislative enactments, regulations, and judicial decisions. 5. 6. Broad guidelines on priority of uses in particular areas. Description of the organizational structure proposed to implement the management program, including responsibilities and interrelationships of local, areawide, state, regional, and interstate agencies. Section 306 of the Act defined Administrative Grants. These second stage grants also could cover up to two-thirds of the costs of administering a state's coastal management program, with no time period specified. To be eligible for an administrative grant, a state first had to receive approval of its management program, which had to meet both procedural and substantive requirements. The program had to provide for control of land and water uses within the coastal zone under one or a combination of: 1. state establishment of criteria and standards for local administration, subject to admistrative review and enforcement of compliance, 2. 3. direct state land and water use planning and regulation, and/or state administrative review of all development plans, projects, or regulations proposed by state or local authority or private developer for consistency with the coastal management program, with power to approve or disapprove. It also had to provide a method of assuring that local regulations do not unreasonably restrict or exclude uses of regional benefit, and that adequate consideration is given to the national interest involved in the siting of facilities necessary to meet requirements other than local in nature. Section 307 of the Act provided for Interagency Coordination and Cooperation, including the federal "consistency" provisions. It required the Secretary to coordinate program activities with other federal agencies, and required all federal agencies to ensure that their licenses, permits, and financial assistance are consistent with approved state coastal management programs. It further specified that federal activities and development projects must be conducted in a manner consistent to the maximum extent practicable with approved state management programs. It recognized and protected a number of existing authorities and laws, specifically exempting requirements of the Federal Water Pollution Control and Clean Air Acts from effect by the Act. It also required the Secretary to obtain the concurrence of DOI or any other administrator of any future federal national land use program before approving a state's coastal management program which includes shorelands also subject to the land use program. The Act also contained some further provisions relating to administration. Section 308 set Public Hearing procedures. Section 309 directed the Secretary to conduct a continuing Review of Performance of the state management programs. Section 310 required grant recipients to keep Records as prescribed on the amount and disposition of funds. Section 311 authorized the establishment of an Advisory Committee. Section 312 authorized grants of up to 50 percent of the costs of acquisition, development and operation of Estuarine Sanctuaries for natural field laboratories. Section 313 required the submission of an Annual Report. Section 314 required the promulgation of program Rules and Regulations. Section 315 was the Authorization of Appropriations, totaling some $186 million for FYs 1973-1977. (As the Act was later amended, some section numbers and titles were changed.' With passage of CZMA, coastal zone management was finally underway. Critics, such as Zile (1974, pp. 235-36 and 274), described the act as "poorly drafted, deficient in substantive standards, vague on policy, and uncertain regarding agency responsibility" and characterized the start as "shaky and uncertain". Environmentalists would have preferred an Act with a stronger federal role with substantive environmental performance standards and required state participation with centralized state authorities for coastal planning and management. Pragmatists were willing to accept the Act as a beginning and to use it to build coastal management support and capacity at the state level. They believed that only an incentive-based, voluntary state participation program built upon existing state regulatory authority could have passed Congress (Kitsos, 1985, p. 278). STATE COASTAL PROGRAM PLANNING: The next stage of coastal management belongs to NOAA and the coastal states. Congress set the initial policy framework and returned periodically to review and amend it. But the job of turning broad federal policy guidelines into explicit state coastal management programs devolved upon a new set of coastal bureaucrats. Since no one had done "coastal zone management" before, the new managers had to invent concepts and procedures on the job. Building A Coastal Program and Bureaucracy The Nixon Administration appropriated no funds to the program during its first year, reflecting the President's reservations about the CZMA. It was nearly 14 months after the enactment of the law before the first $7.2 million appropriation was made (Kitsos, 1985, p. 278). However, NOAA established a Coastal Zone Management Task Force to inventory the status of state coastal programs, develop guidelines and recommendations, coordinate federal agencies, and assess information needs. This group became the Office of Coastal Zone Management (OCZM) within NOAA when funding was provided in 1974. According to a top federal coastal official, by then states were at various stages in developing their programs (Matuszeski, 1985, p. 267). Some, such as California and Rhode Island, already were operating programs and expected immediate federal approval. Others saw the planning grants primarily as another source of federal funds. But most saw the value of the funds to start up coastal management and understood they had a limited time to get the job done. Once the initial appropriation was made, the OCZM moved rapidly to award the first Section 305 program development grants. In 1974, 31 of the 34 eligible states and territories received planning grants totaling $7.199 million. This initial response was so strong the the original $9 million planning grant authorization under Section 305 appeared, after only a short time, to be insufficient (Kitsos, 1985, p. 278). In 1975, the 93rd Congress approved, without opposition, amendments (PL 93-612) making minor administrative changes and increasing the grant authorization to $12 million for each FY through 1977, an increase of $27 million. A number of coastal interest groups testified in support of the coastal management program and the amendments, including the CSO, the presidentiallyappointed National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, and representatives of individual states. Meanwhile, the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee had staked out the coastal management area, and a coastal policy “iron triangle" composed of NOAA, the committee staffs, and the state bureaucrats had formed. According to one observer, "By the start of the 94th Congress, coastal management had become institutionalized, although somewhat tenuously, in the fabric of the political system” (Kitsos, 1985, p. 279). Energizing Effects of the Energy Crisis At the same time that the coastal management program development effort was underway, the national energy crisis was taking shape. The two were closely linked because of the large potential offshore oil and gas reserves. Under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (PL 83-212), the DOI manages the outer continental shelf (OCS) extending seaward from the 3-mile territorial sea which is the boundary of the coastal zone. Following the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, President Nixon directed the DOI to greatly expand OCS leasing, moving it beyond the Gulf of Mexico, in an effort to increase energy independence. Because of the potential onshore and coastal waters environmental impacts of OCS development, the coastal states were alarmed about this increase. Their fears were not calmed by a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Maine that the federal government has sole jurisdiction over resource development beyond the 3-mile limit. States were excluded from OCS development decisions and from any bonuses or royalties from offshore leasing. The 94th Congress waded into the coastal energy issue on two fronts, taking up both a CEIP amendment to the CZMA to help coastal states address the effects of OCS leasing, exploration, and development, and an OCS revenue sharing bill to give coastal states a cut of the federal revenues from offshore production (Kitsos, 1985, p. 279). The OCS revenue sharing bill failed, but the CEIP approach succeeded. The Senate and House both passed bills (S. 586 and H.R. 3981) and the conference committee went to work. After intense negotiation with the Administration, a compromise CEIP measure was passed in 1976 and President Ford signed PL 94-370, the CZMA Amendments of 1976. Inspired by the crisis atmosphere and some dramatic projections of potential impacts, the 1976 Amendments made radical changes in the CZMA. They stated that the national objective of greater energy self-sufficiency would be advanced by federal financial assistance to meet state and local needs resulting from new or expanded energy activity in the coastal zone. To this end they created the CEIP with authorized appropriations of $1.2 billion (including $.8 billion for loans over 10 years and $.4 billion for grants over 8 years), along with increases in other CZMA activities of $20 million for interstate grants, $40 million for research and technical assistance, $24 million for estuarine sanctuaries, and $100 million for beach access. And they raised the federal share of grants from two-thirds to 80 percent. The total authorization was a whopping $1.664 billion. With this major funding increase in the 1976 Amendments, coastal management gained the potential to become a "big money" program (Kitsos, 1985, p. 280), although congressional representatives did not expect actual CEIP appropriations to reach the $1.2 billion authorization level. And as it turned out, the support for CEIP waned quickly after the end of the seventies (not to reappear until the next energy crisis at the end of the 1980s). The 1976 Amendments also tried to straighten out the issue of the states' role in OCS development, requiring OCS leasing to be consistent with approved state coastal management programs. (However, the U.S. Supreme court in a 1984 decision, Secretary of Interior v. California, was to rule that consistency provisions only covered actual development, not leases.) And they provided for a mediation process to resolve federal/state disagreements of state coastal management programs. Almost unnoticed were some procedural changes, which both eased and complicated the planning process (Matuszeski, 1985, p. 269). Planning funds were extended for 3 years; total planning grants were limited to 4 years unless "preliminary approval” was granted; segmented approval of a portion of a state's coastal zone was allowed (which would be used in New Jersey and New Hampshire); and new planning requirements were added for beach access, energy facility siting, and shoreline erosion (Sections 305(b)(7) (8)(9)). Defining Program Approval Standards The OCZM had requested that the program be reauthorized by Congress in 1976, a year earlier than required under the initial 5-year authorization. This reauthorization was made a part of the 1976 Amendments. As a result of the 1976 reauthorization debate, federal CZM officials realized that time was running out on the planning funds and that they needed to define a clear process for "approval" of state programs so that the states could enter the "administration" or implementation phase (Matuszeski, 1985, p. 269). In retrospect, it is surprising that the formal regulations were issued so late, with the original program development regulations published in 1977 and program approval regulations published in 1978. However, as Matuszeski (1985, p. 269) points out, in 1976 the federal staff did not have enough experience with the results of the state planning efforts to be able to match them against the very general CZMA requirements and the unhelpful CZMA program organization options (direct state control, state review of local programs, and state review of local decisions). They had to deal with how to approve a state program that relied on local coastal plans before the local plans were completed and how to judge whether a "networked" state program created from linking existing state laws and programs rather than creating a new coastal management statute would be sufficient in scope, specificity, and enforceability. What this came down to was a careful case-by-case review of each unique state program. The Washington state program was the first to be approved, in 1976. By the end of 1979, when the funding for the program development effort under Section 305 expired, 19 programs had been approved, creating the start of a national network of operating coastal management programs. Another group of seven programs was approved in 1980 (see Table 1). The program development phase was limited to 3 years in the initial Act. This was extended to 4 years in the 1976 amendments to the Act, and could be stretched out for two more years under the preliminary approval provisions of Section 305(d) (Matuszeski, 1985, p.274). In all, the program development phase extended from FY 1974 through FY 1979. Program development grants to states under Section 305 during that period totaled $69.72 million. (See Table 2 for an overview of program development funding.) |