Steven Greenhut Sr. editorial writer and columnist The Orange County Register sgreenhut@ocregister.com

Tommy Robinson, the owner of a 12-foot by 10-foot landlocked slice of empty land in Washington, D.C., has forced the developers of high-rise luxury apartments to build the complex around that tiny nondevelopable plot, according to a front-page story in the March 11-17 issue of Washington's alternative weekly, City Paper. The accompanying photographs are wonderful, as construction crews carefully build the project around Robinson's fenced- off parcel.

The story of Robinson, whose family bought the land in a tax sale 22 years ago for $64, is a living expression of the radical notion of property rights embraced by the nation's founders, who created a government that allowed individuals, rather than government planners, to make decisions about their own lives and property.

Robinson's situation might seem quaint in America these days. Here in California, an unaccountable, dictatorial and most probably unconstitutional politburo called the California Coastal Commission can decide - for any reason at all - what property owners can do within a few miles of the state's 1,000- mile coastline.

We're talking paint colors, fencing, additions, anything. The commission's powers are measureless, its sympathy for the traditional rights of property owners nonexistent. Don't worry, though, this tyranny is exercised in thename of the "environment."

The California Supreme Court is now considering whether the commission is constitutional. Since 2003, two state courts shocked the political establishment by ruling that the commission - founded by initiative in 1972 - violates the state Constitution's separation of powers doctrine.

What took so long to notice?

Separation of powers is a fundamental concept in the American experiment in freedom and self-government. The legislature, which makes the laws, is separate from the executive branch, which interprets and implements the laws, which is separate from the judicial branch, which adjudicates disputes over the meaning of those laws.

The thinking is sound here. A free society separates power so that no one branch of government is unaccountable. There are checks and balances to, well, check and balance agencies that become tyrannical. If one agency can write law, implement law and judge disputes over that law, that agency is a dictatorship, which should trouble us all.

The Coastal Commission does all those things. It is, as the courts have argued correctly, an executive agency with a majority of members appointed by the state Legislature. As the LA Weekly succinctly described it, "On behalf of the commission, the state attorney general is claiming there is nothing wrong with an executive agency made up of a majority of legislative appointees playing quasi-judicial roles in the regulation of the coastline."

Unfortunately, so many of our fellow citizens are so zealous for anything that claims to "protect" the coastline that they are willing to violate any principle and protection.

The technical problem is that a majority of the appointments to the commission are made by the Legislature, rather than the governor. The commission is really an executive agency, and as such should be controlled by the executive branch. This way, there is at least some measure of accountability. Voters disgusted by the commission's ongoing abusescould at least defeat the governor, or pressure him to appoint more reasonable people to the commission. Under the current structure, no one is sufficiently accountable to the public.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, in arguing before the court that the commission is unconstitutional, wrote: "With the creation of the commission, one body was vested with an extraordinary and unprecedented accumulation of power - the power over the hopes and dreams of millions of California citizens as well as the many landowners whose property lies within California's coastline. ... [T]he California Coastal Commission has been an experiment in an unaccountable bureaucracy, subservient only to its own will."

The foundation points to Thomas Jefferson, who argued, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Unfortunately, putting the commission under the authority of the governor might fix the functional problem, but wouldn't fix the deeper problem, namely, that a government agency has carte blanche powers to bully property owners. To me, even if the governor could be held accountable for the actions of the staff and appointees, there's still a problem with the exercise of the commission's power.

Near the ocean, any land owner is subject to the whims of a bureaucracy that is run by people who not only misunderstand the nature of property rights in America today but who are outwardly hostile to it. As I reported in 2002, Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas, in a series of public speeches since 1999, lambasted courts for upholding the property rights of individuals, argued that the U.S. Constitution should be changed to more closely reflect India's Constitution (which guarantees a high quality of life), and defended being a social engineer - someone who uses the power of government to force individuals to change their behavior to fit environmentally friendly lifestyles, as he interprets them.

It should surprise no one, then, that the Coastal Commission has tormented, harassed, bankrupted, abused and destroyed many a property owner. There was the proposal this year that property owners at Big Sur camouflage their homes so boaters don't have to endure the views of development, the endless delays in permitting at Bolsa Chica and other developments, which effectively strip valuable property of its worth, the well-documented, highly reported findings in 1987 that the commission had become a cesspool of influence-peddling and corruption.

Any agency with that much power will surely be corrupt. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Register Editorial Page reported in 1997 about the commission's $470 million suit against a property owner because he sold two pieces of land separately, rather than jointly, as the commission had required - an act that the property owner believed to be retaliation given that he had successfully sued the agency over another matter.

What individual can stand up to such power?

The commission can impose its world view on property owners, even if its regulations have nothing to do with preserving the coastline. In the 1980s, the commission required that coastal developments earmark 25 percent to 35 percent of the units to "affordable" housing. Last year, the commission refused to allow Orange County to gain an emergency permit to remove trees and brush from a creek despite the potential for flooding. The commission forces property owners to hand over easements for beach access and critics say that it routinely shakes down developers, demanding valuable real estate in exchange for permits.

The commission is by definition a tyranny. It can do as it pleases, with nothing much to stand in its way. Unfortunately, most Californians and legislators ardently defend it, which shows how easy it is to lose our freedoms when no onecares much about them. Let's hope one area of potential accountability - the California Supreme Court - will rein in this rogue agency.