The Oregon Beach Bill: Who Owns the Coast

In nineteen sixty-six, a motel owner in Cannon Beach erected a fence on the beach in front of his property and told the public to keep out. The beach, he argued, was private. He owned the land to the water. The public had no right to walk there.

This was a reasonable position under the law as it then stood. And it was exactly the kind of thing that Governor Tom McCall had been watching happen all along the coast as development pressure pushed landowners to assert private control of beachfront access. McCall moved quickly. The Beach Bill he championed that year, which passed the Oregon legislature, established that the wet-sand beach from the low-tide line to the vegetation line is a public highway, a legal designation that no private landowner can override regardless of what they own on the adjacent upland.

The philosophical foundation of that bill went back further, to nineteen thirteen, when Oregon first declared its coastline a public resource. The nineteen sixty-seven legislation was the enforcement action: it closed the loopholes, made the public right explicit, and set Oregon apart from virtually every other coastal state in the country.

California's coast, to the south, remains significantly privatized. Wealthy landowners in Malibu have spent decades litigating access to the beaches in front of their houses. Oregon made a different choice, twice, and enforced it. The three-hundred-forty-mile drive you are on is accessible in the way it is because a motel owner in Cannon Beach put up a fence and a governor decided to take it down.