Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla sues two California agencies as part of protracted legal battle over public access to beach on his property 
 
 Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire Vinod Khosla, who has been engaged in a legal battle over public access to a beloved surfing beach that sits on his land, is suing two state agencies accusing them of using “coercion and harassment” to take away his private property rights – an allegation one campaign group describes as “absurd”. 
 
 Khosla, who has a net worth of $1.55bn, co-founded the technology company Sun Microsystems and now runs the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. In 2008, he bought a 53-acre section of Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. 
 
 In California, all beaches are open to the public up to the “mean high tide line”, broadly defined as the portion of the beach where the sand is wet. 
 
 To honor this, the previous owners of the land had given members of the public access to the beach via a private road, charging a fee for parking. It was a popular spot for fishing, picnicking and surfing. 
 
 Silicon Valley billionaire demands $30m to restore access to former public beach Read more 
 
 When Khosla took over the property, he initially continued to allow public access, but in 2010 he closed the gate and painted over the billboard welcoming people to the beach. This prompted multiple lawsuits from campaign groups seeking continued access to Martins Beach and the introduction of new state legislation. 
 
 Khosla’s lawyers have now filed a suit against the California coastal commission, state lands commission and San Mateo County, claiming that state and local officials have unfairly and irrationally targeted Khosla to force him to either keep the beach road open year-round for a small entrance fee or apply for a permit to close the beach. 
 
 Filed on 30 September, the complaint argues that both commissions and San Mateo County have engaged “in an intentional course of conduct to harass, coerce and single out” the owners of the land and “frustrate their legitimate private property rights for purely personal and political reasons”. Such conduct violates Khosla’s constitutional rights, the complaint states. 
 
 Khosla’s lawyers point out that the Deeney family, which owned the property from the 1900s to 2008, was not subject to the same scrutiny. It was the Deeney family who installed a fence, locked gate and “no trespassing” signs, and they would lock the gate to close the road to the beach “any time they felt like it”. 
 
 “It was routinely closed for private events and in the winter. They did not apply for a permit and were never told by any public official or entity that a permit was required,” said Khosla’s attorney, Dori Yob, in a statement. 
 
 “However, when the subsequent owner continued these practices they were met with threats and harassment in an attempt to coerce them to forfeit their private property rights and allow public access to the property on terms of the County and Coastal Commission’s choosing,” she added. 
 
 Yob also said there had been “extensive misreporting” in the media about the case, including the assertion, first made in the New York Times, that Khosla offered to sell access rights to the beach for $30m. “There was never an offer to sell,” she said. 
 
 Yob points out that the Deeney family sold the property because it was unprofitable and that the state had an opportunity to buy it but decided not to. “Now it wants for free what they did not want to pay for,” Yob said. 
 
 The Surfrider Foundation, a group that has campaigned to restore public access to the beach, disagrees with Yob’s interpretation of events. 
 
 “To allege unfair treatment is absurd,” said the foundation’s legal director, Angela Howe, in a statement. “Khosla is merely being asked by the county, state lands commission and coastal commission to follow the law and honor the beach access rights of California citizens.” 
 
 “I don’t know how state agencies could harass and coerce such a powerful man,” she added in a phone interview. “It’s almost laughable.” 
 
 The Deeneys wanted people to enjoy the beach and worked with local officials to make that possible, she said. Khosla is being treated differently than the Deeney family because he acted very differently – with “total disregard” for the public’s right to access and enjoy the beach. 
 
 “Martins Beach is part of the fabric of the community of Half Moon Bay and has been open for generations to the public,” said Howe. 
 
 “As San Francisco is becoming gentrified, you are getting a lot of money from Silicon Valley taking away public resources. This makes it especially offensive to the everyman.” ||||| HALF MOON BAY — Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has opened yet another front in the long-running legal war over public access to his coastal property, Martins Beach, this time accusing a pair of powerful state agencies of violating his constitutional rights. 
 
 Attorneys for the billionaire investor filed a lawsuit in federal court late last month against the California Coastal Commission, State Lands Commission and San Mateo County, accusing them of violating his right under the 14th Amendment to equal protection under the law. 
 
 The suit, filed Sept. 30, claims there is “a concerted effort by state and local officials to single out, coerce and harass one coastal property and its owner for refusing to cede its private property rights.” 
 
 Khosla claims the defendants have gone after him for “purely personal and political reasons” ever since he decided, in 2010, to break with a decadeslong practice under previous owners of allowing the public to drive down to the water at Martins Beach in exchange for a parking fee. 
 
 San Mateo County and the Coastal Commission have told Khosla that locking his gate off Highway 1, because it changes the public’s ability to reach the shore, constitutes development under the Coastal Act, and the businessman must seek a coastal development permit. He has yet to do so. 
 
 The lawsuit argues that no other coastal property owners, including the previous owners, the Deeney family, have been subjected to similar scrutiny. Representatives for the Coastal Commission, State Lands Commission, and San Mateo County declined to comment on the suit. 
 
 Mark Massara, an attorney for the Surfrider Foundation in one of two lawsuits seeking to restore public access to Martins Beach, a secluded cove just south of Half Moon Bay, called the suit “a laundry list of whining and complaining.” 
 
 “I just don’t get these guys,” he said. “The amount of time and money and effort they’re spending, and all they’re doing is blowing smoke.” 
 
 Besides arguing that Khosla’s constitutional rights have been violated, the suit appears to ask the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco to strike as unconstitutional a legal statute granting the State Lands Commission, which governs California’s tidal lands, the power to purchase property from private owners. 
 
 The commission, under a law authored by state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, was engaged in negotiations through this spring to buy a public right of way from Khosla. The status of those negotiations, which have not produced an agreement, was unclear Sunday. 
 
 In an email, Dori Yob, an attorney for Khosla, said the property owner had no choice but to file a federal suit to seek protection from the defendants. 
 
 “We, as a matter of principle, are opposed to state and local officials using coercion and harassment to ‘take’ private property rights,” she said. “This is exactly what certain staff of the Coastal Commission and other state agencies have done — engaged in a campaign to extract private property rights from a property owner through extra-judicial harassing and coercive behavior.” 
 
 Khosla’s critics argue he still hasn’t taken basic steps to resolve the conflict at the state and local levels. 
 
 “They had an opportunity to negotiate with the state in good faith,” said Massara, “and they blew it off.”
– In California, the public essentially has the right to access the portion of the beach that gets wet. But with a great deal of coastal development, how one gets to this public strip of land can be far murkier, as a new lawsuit involving a private property near Half Moon Bay demonstrates. In 2008, Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems, bought 53 acres of Martins Beach, which sits just south of San Francisco; two years later, he decided to close the gate and paint over the billboard that had directed beachgoers (it's a popular surfing spot) to a for-a-fee parking area the previous owners had set up, reports the Guardian. In other words, the former owners played nice, and Khosla didn't want to play at all. In his lawsuit filed Sept. 30, Khosla accuses the California Coastal Commission, State Lands Commission, and San Mateo County of unfairly targeting him. The San Jose Mercury News explains that the latter two bodies informed Khosla that what he did in revoking the beach access fits the Coastal Act's definition of development, which means he needs to apply for a coastal development permit. Khosla says the agencies are trying "to harass, coerce, and single [him] out" and says they never interfered when the prior owners locked the gate during winter months or private events. The legal director for the Surfrider Foundation, which has filed its own lawsuit to restore public access to the beach, calls it "almost laughable" that Khosla would claim "state agencies could harass and coerce such a powerful man." (Check out the nation's best beaches.)