As historic moments go on the Central Coast, 9 p.m. on March 18, 2021, and the 10 minutes or so leading up to it, will always be hard to beat.
That's when it began to dawn on hundreds of people who had hung on to the end of that day's marathon meeting of the California Coastal Commission that the commissioners were really, finally going to do it: The shutdown of off-road vehicle activity at the Oceano Dunes had clearly gone from a question of "if" to a question of "when."
Throughout the day, the cracks had been appearing in the old regime. The good burghers of Pismo Beach and the South County chambers of commerce popped up to intone once again that no more dune buggies would mean economic ruin, still citing the 2017 "economic impact analysis" commissioned by State Parks, which the Coastal Commission knew had been thoroughly discredited.