Oregon's public beaches and adjacent developed and undeveloped dunes and bluffs experience erosion and other hazards due to winter storm waves, weathering, and geologic instability. In privately owned developed areas, the typical hazard response is to install a hard shore protection structure, leading some to question the effectiveness of policies that were designed to discourage such structures. An evaluation of shore protection and land use policy implementation was undertaken using a geographic information system to analyze outcomes of policy decisions within the Siletz littoral cell on the central Oregon coast. Study results, detailed in this article, found that policies designed to mitigate hazards, control upland development, and protect the beach are often ineffective. Based on this analysis, Oregon's ocean shore protection management regime needs an overhaul. Such a process is now underway under the aegis of the 1990 amendments to the federal Coastal Zone Management Act.
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James W. Good (1994) studied this question.
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