Private property rights often collide with public use of coastline
Each year, thousands flock to the beaches of Northwest Florida to find the peace and serenity offered by sun, surf and sand.
But more and more it seems, the beaches have become battlegrounds, where tourists and locals alike clash over who’s trampling on whose slice of paradise.
Lisa Frifand, a 20-year South Walton County resident, was recently chewed out by a belligerent tourist as she was fishing at the same beach location she’d been casting from for years.
Not long after, following a morning of picking up trash left behind by others, a beach service employee refused to let her use a garbage can at a condominium’s private beach to throw the litter away.
“It’s starting to get really territorial,” Frifand said.
A frequent beach visitor, Frifand says she sees people being accosted by “self appointed beach police” ... “grown up hall monitors” ... and “visitors for the week” exercising “a sense of entitlement” passed on by “companies/owners that rent their properties for the season.”
“Just way too out of hand and elitist,” she said.
A growing problem
Walton County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Audie Rowell, the agency’s South Walton Bureau Chief, acknowledged the number of hostile beach encounters has grown.
“A lot of them happen next to beach accesses, people use the public accesses and start moving down the beach,” he said.
Large stretches of Walton County coastline have been staked off and claimed as private beach by condominiums. Signs declaring them as such serve as notification to the uninformed.
Beach service vendors put out chairs and umbrellas for the condominium guests. They pay the condominium homeowners’ associations for the right to be on the beach, where they recoup their money by renting their property to condo guests.
Becky Downs, vice president of the Beach Retreat association, said the beach services crews would deal with any trespassers.
“They’re going to take care of us,” she said.
Edgar Lauce, who was working at the Maravilla Condominium’s private beach, said sometimes people who don’t belong wander onto the private beach or sit in chairs reserved for condo guests.
“We just tell them they have to leave,” he said.
He said he never encounters problems.
“People are happy here,” he said. “They are on vacation.”
Sharing the beach
Walton County Commissioners took a step this year to end confrontations on the county’s public beaches.
Residents had complained bitterly last year that beach vendors were setting up chairs and umbrellas across the entire stretch of public beach, according to Commission Chairman Bill Imfeld.
“People were showing up with their own chairs and umbrellas and they were having to set up behind the vendors,” he said.
This year, beach vendors are allowed to set up rentals on 50 percent of the public beach and leave the other half of the beach for public use.
So far this tourist season, Imfeld said, he’s not heard a single complaint about public beach access.
Is it trespassing?
More and more frequently the Walton County Sheriff’s Office is fielding calls from beachfront property owners with complaints about trespassers.
Oftentimes, the trespasser is someone who’s been visiting the same stretch of coast for years.
“The private property owner is saying, ‘This is mine. They’re trespassing. I paid millions,’ ” Adkinson said. “And the beachgoer is saying, ‘I’ve been coming here for 80 years.’ ”
One such dispute ended badly for the owner of a Scenic Gulf Drive townhome when she was arrested for battery after slapping the phone from a woman she’d accused of trespassing.
The arrest had nothing to do with any property rights issue, Rowell said, and the victim in the case was not, in fact, violating her accuser’s rights.
“She had no basis to be kicking anyone off the property,” he said “She was trying to enforce for 10 residents in one group of townhomes. You can’t do that.”
Hard call for cops
Sheriff Adkinson doesn’t like that his officers are so frequently called in to mediate civil property rights disputes like these.
“It has put the Sheriff’s Office in a horrible position,” he said. “We do not want to be in the position of defining what is and what is not someone’s private property.”
Adkinson said “for years” his agency was forced to tackle beach property disputes without “a written directive on how to handle stuff.”
These days his deputies are armed with a seven-page policy to rely on “when answering calls for service related to allege(d) trespassing on private property on Gulf front beaches.”
The guidelines dictate that no trespass laws be enforced seaward of an established erosion control line.
The ECL is a line established by the state and “recorded in the public records of Walton County,” deputies are informed in their guidelines -- though in reality there’s no way a deputy on the beach can be sure where it might be.
Walton County’s rules also state that deputies are not to engage beachgoers in “wet sand areas,” areas where the beaches have been restored using tax dollars or areas seaward of the mean high tide mark.
Those rules are in place because the State Attorney’s Office has decreed it will not prosecute trespass cases in the areas designated, according to Rowell.
Walton County’s rules also place a great deal of burden on a beach property owner to prove they own the slice of beach from which they want someone removed.
Property owners are required to provide officers investigating a trespass call, among other things, a deed and a “signed, sealed and certified survey” approved by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
“We have to insure we have the property authority to make an arrest,” Rowell said. “We can’t go out there and guess, then go to court and say, ‘It’s pretty close. I don’t know if it is or not.’ ”
Homeowners’ rights
Deeds like the one the Sheriff’s Office require cost $1,200, according to Ed Goodwin, who owns beachfront property on Fort Panic Road in Santa Rosa Beach.
He has paid to obtain one and is well versed on the laws pertaining to his rights as a property owner.
Goodwin has marked off his section of beach with a fence made of posts and plastic chain. He said he’s fought the county, the Tourist Development Council and his neighbors over the years to maintain his privacy.
“I’m an old farm boy from Michigan, and you don’t take my property,” Goodwin said.
Maintaining a front yard on the white sands of Northwest Florida isn’t easy, Goodwin and his wife DeLanie said.
They’ve had people walk right into their home, urinate under their house and write dirty words in the sand in their front yard, they said.
Goodwin said his life was once threatened during a heated discussion with some surfers who had chosen to take a shortcut through his yard and the sea oats he carefully cultivates.
“What people don’t seem to understand is this is our home,” he said. “People don’t have the right to enter our property without permission.”
Okaloosa has its share of beach clashes
Okaloosa County officials wrestle with beach trespassing issues similar to those of their neighbor to the east, but on a much smaller scale.
That probably explains why Okaloosa County deputies are armed with a similar, though more abbreviated, set of guidelines for handling disagreements than those in Walton County.
The Okaloosa County order tells deputies that trespass laws are not to be enforced “anywhere in the area 20 feet from the water’s edge.”
Landward of 20 feet, it states, deputies may enforce trespass laws, “but may not physically arrest anyone for trespassing on such beach areas.”
It authorizes deputies to issue a “notice to appear” if the alleged trespasser refuses to leave the area and the property owner signs a complaint.
Okaloosa’s most intriguing private/public beach property dispute these days involves developer Peter Bos and the residents of Gulf Breeze Court.
In January, armed with all the proper city permitting, Bos installed a fence that blocks access from the subdivision onto a sandy lot he had bought 18 months before.
He did so to prevent people from walking across the lot to a beach fronting the Destin Pass.
“The bottom line is we have people coming and cutting across my property,” Bos said in February. “They're knocking over chairs, leaving trash and nobody is policing it.”
Neighborhood residents have made no secret of their resentment.
Some, like Marcie Bell, believe they’ve had deeded access to the property Bos has blocked for more than 20 years, which gives them a right to continued use.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Tom McLaughlin at 850-315-4435 or tmclaughlin@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomMnwfdn.