Tech billionaire Vinod Khosla has sued California and a county sheriff in what is the latest battle

Publish date: 2024-06-19
2020-01-27T20:49:43Z

Just three weeks after the state of California filed a lawsuit against Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla alleging that he was restricting public access to a secluded beach, the investor has responded with a lawsuit of his own, The Mercury News reported.

On Friday, Khosla filed a lawsuit in US District Court in San Francisco that asserts San Mateo County Sheriff Carlos Bolanos has failed to cite or remove visitors that use a road on Khosla's private property to access Martin's Beach — a popular coastal spot frequented and beloved by local surfers and families — without paying a fee. The complaint stipulates that the beach visitors were trespassers. The sheriff's office has refrained from arresting and citing them, due to the fact that there are so many unresolved filings that have been made in the past decade, according to The Mercury News.

The lawsuit also names officials with the California Coastal Commission and State Lands Commission and the San Mateo County Planning and Building Department Director Steve Monowitz as defendants.

Khosla's attorneys wrote in the complaint that "this case involves a concerted effort by state and local officials to single out, coerce, and harass one coastal property owner for refusing to cede its private property rights."

This isn't the first unresolved court case involved in Khosla's attempt to keep the secluded beach off-limits to the public.

For more than a decade, Khosla has been accused of blocking access to the road that runs through his private property, a road that is the only route to Martin's Beach.

Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, paid $37 million for the 53-acre property near Half Moon Bay, a coastal town about an hour south of San Francisco, in 2008.

Khosla's lawyer, Dori Yob Kilmer, said in a statement sent to Business Insider in early January that prior to Khosla's purchase, the beach was privately owned by the Deeney family for nearly 100 years and that the family "chose to use it as a revenue-generating beach-access business," charging the public a fee to enjoy the spot.

But soon after making his purchase, Khosla closed the gate that led to Martin's Beach and posted a sign warning that there would be no access, angering local surfers and families who had long frequented it.

Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Khosla's attorneys said the closure was because the cost to maintain the beach outweighed the revenue that would be generated from daily use fees.

The California appeals court would later rule that Khosla violated state law by barring the public from the beach without applying for a permit. When the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation sued Khosla, he took his case to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear it in 2018. If it had decided to hear it, as Business Insider's Melia Russell wrote, the results could have caused a shift in how beach property rights are managed across the nation.

In an interview with The New York Times later that year, Khosla said he wished he had "never bought the property," but he was determined to continue fighting for his privacy based on principle. 

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