A decades-long battle over emergency and public access to a beach below a Princess Street bluff-top property owned by a prominent La Jolla developer has resurfaced.
In 2016, Ure Kretowicz conceded the public’s right to access the cobblestone beach below his property at 7957 Princess St. in La Jolla. This followed a years-long court battle he waged against beach-access advocates. That fight ended after Kretowicz exhausted all his legal appeals. 
Kretowicz had argued there was “no title notification” of an existing easement cutting across his property when he bought it. He insisted he didn’t learn of the alleged easement until he applied for permits to remodel in the mid-’90s.
Now, two years later, the battle over the Princess pocket beach has resumed with a group of neighbors surrounding Kretowicz’s property campaigning against restoring public access there.
“We endorse the creation of an emergency access, but we strongly oppose the creation of a public access,” said Kretowicz’s neighbors in an October 2018 letter to the California Coastal Commission.
Among neighbors’ arguments: Construction establishing the proposed public access will further destabilize an already unstable bluff; another existing public access is only 600 feet away near the Marine Room Restaurant; Princess Street is too narrow, only 14 feet wide. … Creating the proposed public access there will almost certainly increase the number of illegally parked cars; the pocket beach is very small, and dangerous, with rising tides frequently trapping individuals there; the staircase accessing that beach will be steep, narrow and accident-prone; and lifeguard stations at the Cove and Kellogg Beach are too distant to patrol the small pocket beach.
“The Lifeguard Division is always in support of safe access to the beaches and views,” noted San Diego Lifeguard Chief James Garland.
Alexander Llerandi of the California Coastal Commission said the Princess Street beach access issue is a done deal.
“This has already been adjudicated by the Commission years ago,” Llerandi said. “There is a recorded vertical access easement for both emergency services and the public across the Kretowicz property all the way down to the beach. Put simply, the existence of the easements and their use by the public is a settled issue.”
Llerandi said nonprofit ECO San Diego has accepted oversight of the Princess Street easement. He added ECO wants to restore the access way down the easement, then apply to the Commission to build (the trail).
“[Public] access is going to happen,” said Pam Heatherington of ECO San Diego, a nonprofit working to improve San Diego’s quality of life and economic vitality. “We are working toward opening the trail.”
Noting their group has obtained an approximately $38,000 Coastal Conservancy grant to do initial Princess trail restoration, Heatherington said, “We are now cutting [trail] brush to do a topographical survey. Once that’s done, we have a Carmel Valley landscape architecture firm lined up to do the design.”
Regarding Princess Street beach access, Heatherington contended, “The public still has the right to the shoreline.”
For his part, Ure Kretowicz was surprised the Princess beach-access issue got resurrected.
“We were trying to repair the cul-de-sac in front of our house after SDG&E updated the gas line for the houses along Princess Street,” Kretowicz said. “We needed to get a coastal development permit from the Coastal Commission. We were asking them for approval to repair the cul de sac after SDG&E had trenched through it. Then all kinds of other issues, not related, were raised by others.”
Melinda Merryweather, a longtime beach-access proponent who worked to put that into the La Jolla community plan in 1995, concurred that arguments opposing re-opening the Princess Street trail are moot.
“That has been a public beach access since the days the Indians were there,” Merryweather said. “It has now been determined that yes, this a public beach access — and that is the end of that story. There is no going back on that decision.”