Billionaire businessman Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, sparked public resentment earlier this month in San Francisco when he asked for $30 million from the State of California for allowing public access to the beach he had bought eight years ago.
At the core of the court battle involving Khosla and the State is a prime 53-acre parcel of Martins Beach, a haven for the beach-going public that Khosla bought for US $37.5 million eight years ago. Initially, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist let people use the beach, but in 2010 locked the gates on Martins Beach Road and posted guards, according to a New York Times report. But now Khosla is demanding $30 million from the state for re-opening the gates of the beach for public and also give access to another 39.5-acre parcel that includes coastal cliffs.
In a letter to the State Lands Commission Khosla’s lawyer said that an “easement leading over his property” in San Mateo County to the beach would cost California about $30 million, not including the enormous additional costs for road repairs, annual operations and maintenance.
SFGate said Khosla’s lawyer Dori Yob offered the estimate in a Feb. 3 letter to the state Court of Appeal, which is handling one of several lawsuits over the property.
The report said quoting Jennifer Lucchesi, the executive officer of the State Lands Commission, as saying that she was equally taken aback when she received the letter, which she submitted as evidence in the case. The commission contends the tidelands Khosla claims are actually owned by the state. “We have not seen any documentation or analysis supporting that $30 million value,” Lucchesi said.
Gary Redenbacher, a lawyer for Friends of Martins Beach that sued Khosla in San Mateo Superior Court said that the $30 million figure is rather amusing and that the state Constitution makes all beaches public property.
The report said that Friends of Martins Beach sued in San Mateo Superior Court, and Judge Gerald Buchwald ruled in Khosla’s favor in 2013, saying the beach was subject to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and required the United States to recognize Mexican land grants. In essence, Buchwald said, the beach had been in private hands long before laws were passed requiring public access to the coast, the SFGate report said.
But whatever be the outcome of the battle in the court that is expected to give its decision in summer this year, the issue has become the latest “class-charged standoff” involving a wealthy entrepreneur.
“People are saying, ‘Talk about entitlement: Rich people think they can get away with anything,’” the New York Times quoted Rob Caughlan, the former president of the non-profit Surfrider Foundation, as saying. “All we want is to get Khosla to follow the same law as everyone else does,” the report said. Beah goers had been staging protest outside the locked gates, demanding reopening of the beach.
Commenting on Khosla’s court battle, technology entrepreneur and Wall Street Journal columnist Vivek Wadhwa said that public resentment against Khosla is understandable given the increasing inequality of wealth in places like San Francisco.
“I think very highly of Vinod but here he is making a mistake by having such a public fight. You are seeing the adverse effects of income inequality across the United States with the rise of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz on the extreme right and Bernie Sanders on the extreme left,” Wadhwa told News India Times.
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