Our beautiful beaches are being polluted by politics
SANTA ROSA BEACH — You come here to unwind. To watch waves lapping against the shore, as they will until the end of time. To see a giddy child at play, trying to outrun the tide.
The beaches of the Emerald Coast, in Walton County in the Panhandle, are Florida at its best. Then you see Florida at its bureaucratic worst.
Signs, planted in the sugary white sand. Big, bold, obnoxious signs, threatening to arrest you simply for walking on the beach.
“Posted: private property,” a sign says. “Violators will be prosecuted,” another says. A third heralds the presence of Big Brother: “Security cameras in use. All beach activities are being recorded.”
A sense of bliss is ruined, thanks to the Florida legislature and former Gov. Rick Scott, who a year ago enacted a law, House Bill 631, supposedly codifying a centuriesold doctrine known as customary use that makes dry sand accessible to the public.
For generations, everyone seemed to get along fine without menacing signs, until Florida’s politicians decided they had to safeguard beach access and private property rights but only after a legal process, including court approval. HB 631 did that and remains tangled in court.
On this holiday weekend, as crowds flock to Florida beaches, it’s timely to reexamine what has happened.
Walton, one of the state’s reddest counties with one of the highest growth rates in the U.S., adopted a customary use ordinance in 2016 without going to court. Property owners rebelled — including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a major property owner.
The result was a law that only affected Walton, and perhaps for that reason received hardly any public or media attention in the 2018 session.
“If a local government wants to make that private area, that may have been private for a long time, open to the public, there has to be a process to do that,” one of the bill sponsors, state Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, told The News Service of Florida. “This customary use doctrine has always contemplated that you go to court and ask the judge to authorize you to do that … All the bill does is say, look, we need to create a process so that we don’t have chaos.”
But chaos has ensued. All hell broke loose. It became the Lawyers’ Relief Act.
Scott failed to heed the advice of residents such as Alice Duncan, a Destin-area real estate agent, who warned him to veto the bill last year: “Our very livelihood depends on everyone having access to our greatest natural resource.”
Then, in the midst of a U.S. Senate race, as public outrage grew, Scott issued a contradictory executive order, directing state agencies “not to adopt any rule restricting public access to a beach,” including telling prosecutors not to charge anyone with violating the law he had signed.
Opponents, under the banner of Florida Beaches for All, successfully intervened on the county’s side in April in a lawsuit in support of Walton’s ordinance. Dozens of people held hands on the beach in a brief show of solidarity on July 1, the one-year anniversary of HB 631 becoming law.
Backed by more than two dozen law firms, hundreds of beachfront homeowners, some under the name Florida Coastal Property Rights, intervened on the opposite side. They argue that customary use is an illegal taking of private property without just compensation. The case is before Circuit Judge David Green in DeFuniak Springs.
“If Walton County loses,” says Walton County’s land-use attorney, David Theriaque, “the historic use of the beach will be lost.”
Day after day, month after month, both sides slug it out across social media, with the rhetoric growing increasingly hostile at times and neighbors turning against each other.
But dire predictions of economic disaster because of the new law do not appear to have come to pass. Realtors report cancellations, but traffic on U.S. 98 and State Road 30A is still bumper-to-bumper with SUVs from Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee, and restaurants are still crowded.
Walton County Sheriff Mike Adkinson has exercised restraint by refusing to make any arrests for trespassing. That has drawn criticism from some property owners such as James Lince, who wrote on Facebook about “the political game the sheriff is playing, and not enforcing basic trespass law, which has been on the books for a long, long time.”
The sheriff says HB 631 is ambiguous and that activists on both sides keep trying to become martyrs to their cause by trying to get arrested. His deputies won’t play along, and any property owner who wants a trespassing citation has to get a warrant.
“This is my home,” Adkinson told the Sun Sentinel. “Anything that casts this area in an undeserved negative light I hate to see … But how do you enforce making people good neighbors?”