UCLA

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Regulatory Program (Corps) is one of several agencies with overlapping and sometimes conflicting regulatory authority along the coast. The Corps has also become the de facto federal regulator of ocean-based activities by virtue of its broad authority to regulate most types of construction activities from the high tide line to the outer continental shelf.

This dissertation seeks to understand 1) whether the Corps is fulfilling its mission of making permit decisions that balance development and natural resource protection in ocean and coastal habitats and 2) how its permits interact with sea level rise adaptation planning in California. First, I describe the Corps' permit data and present methods that can be used by others to acquire and use these data. Next, I used these data to show that the odds of compensatory mitigation was four times less likely when the impact occurred in an ocean/tidal system, even after controlling for differences that make ocean/tidal impacts less likely to meet the Corps' criteria for requiring compensatory mitigation. Finally, I use a subset of these data to show that the Corps' permits overlap with the California Coastal Commission's Sea Level Rise Policy Guidance in several areas, but the Corps' use of streamlined permits is misaligned with this Guidance in several areas. For example, bank and shoreline armoring work against California's Guidance, but the Corps authorized 98% of bank hardening and 100% of shoreline armoring projects with streamlined permits.

Ocean and coastal habitats are deserving of the same level of protection as freshwater habitats. In the absence of comprehensive ocean management, I propose several steps the Corps can take to improve its protection of ocean and coastal habitats while still allowing development. For example, the Corps could improve the parity of compensatory mitigation rates between ocean/tidal and freshwater impacts by applying existing policy more uniformly to permanent impacts in ocean/tidal, non-special aquatic sites, authorized under Section 404. In addition, the Corps' California Districts could improve its alignment with California's Sea Level Rise Guidance by issuing General Permits for projects encouraged by the Guidance and certified Local Coastal Programs.