You might take it as a given that if you invest hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars in your home, you have the right to protect it from damage, particularly that caused by bad weather or other natural disasters. But that is apparently not the case in California, especially if you happen to live along the Golden State’s 840 miles of coastline.

Thomas Frick and Jennifer Lynch, two neighboring property owners who live atop a bluff overlooking the ocean in Encinitas, had a seawall and the lower portion of a long-existing stairway down to the beach that they share destroyed during a severe storm in 2010. The city granted Frick and Lynch’s late mother approval to restore the structures, but the California Coastal Commission had other ideas. It prohibited any repairs to the stairway, and would only grant a temporary, 20-year permit for the seawall, after which the homeowners would have to again seek the permission of the Commission or be forced to tear it out.

The homeowners won a lawsuit in a state superior court in 2013, but an appellate court panel reversed the ruling in a 2-1 decision the following year. The case, Lynch v. California Coastal Commission, is now in the hands of the California Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on May 4.

“The Coastal Commission’s treatment of these homeowners is part of an anti-seawall agenda that the agency has been imposing up and down the coast,” Pacific Legal Foundation Executive Vice President and General Counsel John Groen, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said in a statement. “This case offers the state Supreme Court an opportunity to affirm the rule of law against an agenda-driven bureaucracy. Coastal homeowners have a statutory and constitutional right to protect the integrity of their property, and the commission’s subversion of that right must end.”

But it is not just unelected bureaucrats that are threatening property rights all along the state’s coast. Lawmakers like Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Monterey Bay, are trying to get in on the act, too.

Under the California Coastal Act of 1976, the Coastal Commission generally is supposed to permit seawalls in cases such as the replacement of existing structures or danger from erosion (although, as the Lynch case demonstrates, it has already begun to neglect this duty). Stone’s Assembly Bill 1129 would officially remove this obligation and define existing structures as those built prior to January 1, 1977. Not surprisingly, the bill has the enthusiastic backing of the Coastal Commission.

“It’s an absurd notion that they can do this,” Peter Sandmann, general counsel for the Seadrift Association of the Stinson Beach community in Marin County, told KPIX 5, a CBS affiliate in San Francisco. “People have bought and built things along the beach and now the Coastal Commission wants to come in and retroactively say they can’t be protected.”

The move is all the more puzzling given the great lengths and expense to which governments go to prevent other kinds of erosion. Many spend significant sums on dredging and replenishing sand to prevent beach erosion, and during the wetter seasons (particularly following an active wildfire season) news reports are filled with efforts to provide homeowners with sandbags to minimize flooding and mudslide damage, and crews working to remove dirt and rock from landslides.

Yet, somehow, the situation is different when it comes to private property along the coast. It is a good thing that we do not have a state agency with similar scope and power regulating homes in the hills and mountains, or else those homeowners would be doomed as well.

Ironically, the Coastal Commission contends that seawalls cause erosion by preventing sand supply and “fixing the back of the beach” — so its solution is to allow other erosion of the private property where people live! Perhaps property owners should just pick up their houses and move them back a bit every several years, as the Coastal Commission allows coastal erosion to move inward. Better yet, they should not own property near the coast at all, which seems to be the true agenda here.

But property rights should not cease to exist just because a property is particularly beautiful or desirable. And in no case should the government endanger people’s homes — and, potentially, their lives — by preventing them from taking reasonable measures to protect their own property from the elements.

Adam B. Summers is a columnist with the Southern California News Group.