Earlier this February, the California Coastal Commission voted during a 12-hour public hearing in Morro Bay to fire its executive director, Dr. Charles Lester.

There’s a liquor store or a church on every corner, Bryan Appleton likes to say of the West Oakland neighborhood where he lives and has run an industrial salvage shop since 2010. One nearby church was torn down recently and the pastor offered him the 16-foot cherrywood pews, which are now lined up neatly along one wall in the back studio. Appleton recites their history easily: they’d been in three churches over their century of use, starting in Oklahoma before…