PESCADERO, Calif. — Silicon Valley manager Mike Polacek and his schoolteacher wife, Ana, considered themselves environmentalists. They loved the rolling farms that dotted their little piece of coastal San Mateo County.
So when they bought 18 hilltop acres up Bean Hollow Road half a mile from the ocean, they planned to build their dream house and farm the land around it.
For three years, they quizzed farmers and courted environmentalists. They studied the soil and drafted a plan to plant specialty crops that could make a little money.
"The agricultural community loved it, the county Planning Commission approved it and there were no appeals," Mike Polacek, 41, recalled recently.
"Then at the very last minute, literally 5 o'clock at night," he said, "the Coastal Commission appealed it. It was like somebody punched me in the stomach. We thought we'd done everything right. But we didn't know what we were up against."
The Polaceks were up against one of the nation's most powerful planning agencies. The commission saw the couple's plans as a new test in its three-decade struggle to keep as much as possible of the state's 1,100-mile coastline pristine.
The target this time is the "mansionization" of coastal farms and remote open spaces.
"The dot-com boom really changed everything," said Peter Douglas, executive director of the commission. "People with wealth buy 50 or 100 acres just to put a starter castle on it; technology allows them to live remotely and commute electronically.
"We have a history of speculators buying ranches for subdivision; but this is a new phenomenon," Douglas said. "Our farm and remote scenic lands are under pressure by people who want to build these mega-homes."
And as prices rise, the land moves out of the reach of working farmers, Douglas said: "The farming is lost. It's a trend that set off alarm bells."
To restrain the trend, the commission has begun pressing untested limits on development of the wooded ridgelines of Mendocino County, the vegetable farms of San Mateo County and the grazing lands of San Luis Obispo County.
The Polacek family planned to continue farming. But the commission wanted to ensure that future owners of the property would do the same.
The agency sought and eventually won an "affirmative" farmland easement to require that owners in perpetuity farm the land, if at all feasible.
