As waves lapped against the shoreline this spring, Walton County resident Sara James Day was discussing the fight over public beach access when a property manager told her she had to move.
“You know you’re on private property,” he told Day.
“No, we’re in the wet sand today,” Day responded. She had walked directly to the shore through a public beach access parking lot.
Day then spent nearly 30 minutes arguing over how close to the water someone must be in Walton County to be on a public beach instead of private property.
But the battle wasn’t new. The fight over one Gulf county”s sugar white sand has moved from the beaches to the courtroom and back to the halls of Florida’s Capitol seven years after lawmakers tried to settle the issue.
Now the Legislature is reversing course, passing a bill to repeal a 2018 law governing the establishment of beach access.
Even if Gov. Ron DeSantis signs the bill, the fight over beach access is unlikely to end in Walton County — or anywhere else in Florida, where growing populations and eroding beaches create arguments over invisible lines in the sand in one of the nation’s most-visited states. And as summer’s heavy beach traffic arrives, tourists and locals alike may be left confused and aggravated in areas that rely on visitor dollars as an economic engine.
Two former state Senate presidents, Don Gaetz (R-Crestview) and Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples), voted against the reversal measure, SB 1622. Both predicted little will change.
“I believe the Hatfields and the McCoys will continue to fight in Walton County,” said Gaetz, who previously represented the area in the state Senate.
Passidomo sponsored the Senate version of the 2018 legislation, HB 631, which she describes as “good policy” designed to help establish legal beach access. She said there will be more lawsuits once the law is repealed.
“I think the county is going to pass an ordinance, then the property owners are going to file a suit,” Paissdomo said. “And they’ll be back where they started.”
The wider battle over access
Walton County isn’t the only place where people are arguing even about where a visitor can stand. That’s because it’s not clear on the beaches or in state law where the public is or is not allowed.
The Florida Constitution says beaches below the mean high water line are public land. That’s a relatively narrow strip of land on most beaches.
The Florida Supreme Court in 1974 expanded public access to the beach — in theory.
The state’s high court said access exists under the “customary use” doctrine from English common law. The court said access to dry sandy beaches must be based on recreational use that has been “ancient, reasonable, without interruption and free from dispute.”
Beach access advocates frequently argue the ruling established a public right to beach access.
But property rights lawyers claim — without success so far — that Florida’s customary use doctrine is unconstitutional and doesn’t represent established case law.
In 2016, Walton County adopted a beach access ordinance based on customary use. Property owners sued, arguing access should be determined on a case-by-case basis for each individual parcel of property or a small group of lots.
After a federal court upheld the ordinance, current U.S. Ambassador to Israel and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was among the property owners clamoring for action. They said rude beachgoers were using their property to hold parties late into the night.
Passidomo sponsored the legislation in 2018 that rescinded Walton County’s ordinance and required local governments to seek judicial review on any property where customary use access is declared.
While she claims the bill was meant to protect beach access, critics argued the Legislature was siding with rich property owners at the public’s expense.
Then-Gov. Rick Scott, who was running for the U.S. Senate, faced a backlash after signing the bill. He blamed the Legislature for creating “considerable confusion” and issued an executive order he said would keep beaches open.
Some beach advocates said the opposite has happened, just as they predicted.
Not a day at the beach
In the Florida Panhandle, Walton County was tied up in a legal morass as they sought judicial review of more for public access on nearly 1,200 beachfront parcels and spent about $8 million in legal fees.
County Attorney Clay Adkinson said the county notices required by the 2018 law triggered opposition from many beachfront owners who in the past wouldn’t have challenged public access.
And beachfront owners have pushed to block public access in other areas since the law passed.
In Pinellas County, the tiny beachfront town of Redington Beach adopted an access ordinance in 2018 just prior to the new state law taking effect. Beachfront owners sued but lost in state courts.
They then sued and won in federal court but that was overturned when the town challenged the ruling before the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The town won at the district level again in 2024, but the landowners are appealing again.
In Franklin County, property owners on Alligator Point erected signs after 2020 saying their stretch of beach was private. By 2024, the signs had been damaged or removed.
In 2022, the towns of Palm Beach and Ocean Ridge had put up no trespassing signs in response to the law, according to the Palm Beach County chapter of the Surfrider Foundation.
The signs in Ocean Ridge “clearly intimidated beach goers who were on a public beach access pathway to the ocean,” the Surfrider chapter said on its website.
In Walton County last week, visitors to Santa Rosa Beach were greeted by signs warning against trespassing on private property even though they were walking through a public access that is about 30 feet wide.
Day seemed prepared when a community services officer arrived after the owner’s complaint. Her chair was much closer to the water than to any of the three-story homes.
She pointed out lines on the sand that reflected the high tide line further away from the water than where she was sitting.
“I’m not going to debate what’s wet sand,” officer J. Guard told Day, insisting she move about 18 inches closer to the water in response to the property owner’s complaint.
Jakki Davis of Memphis, Tennessee, asked the officer what to do if a child in their group repeatedly wandered over the line.
“We’ve been coming here 26 years — this is sad,” she told POLITICO. “We didn’t know you could own the beachfront.”
A county confronts wave of concern
At a meeting that afternoon in DeFuniak Springs, County Attorney Adkinson, when asked by a county commissioner what will happen if the 2018 law is repealed, answered that “nothing changes” on their local beaches.
Adkinson explained that the county has entered into settlements with landowners that won’t change as a result of the Legislature’s reversal. He said the legislation will have a “profound effect” on other cities and counties considering beach access ordinances, but not Walton County.
But he also said the bill is a “huge assist” that could resolve the beach disputes in the future. The bill establishes that public access is allowed in areas where beaches are widened with new sand.
“This for us is not the first step in reestablishing and restoring public use rights across more of our beaches,” he said. “We’ve already taken those first steps.”
But other speakers said Walton County could be doing more now to protect tourists and vacationers even after the 2018 law is repealed.
“How are we going to prevent the chaos from coming back?” Commissioner Brad Drake asked. “People [are] saying I can set my towel here? ‘No you can’t.’”
Dave Rauschkolb, a surfer who owns a beachfront restaurant in Walton County, called the problem “almost unmanageable” and said the county must stop homeowners from intimidating visitors.
“They say, ‘You can’t sit here, you can’t sit there,’” Rauschkold said. “Well, those [beach visitors] folks are not going to come back. They’re like, ‘We’re not coming to this beach any more.’”
Day told the commission that she was told by an officer, “If you’re not in the tide you’re not in the public space.”
Adkinson interjected that he didn’t agree with the officer’s interpretation of where the public beach exists.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this,” the county attorney said. “And every time it’s been addressed as, ‘We’re sorry that’s not what they’ve been instructed to do.’”
Other commissioners said signs are needed to tell beachgoers clearly where they can be and where they can’t be.
“In the past we had like 20 feet from the wet sand that was public,” Walton County Commissioner Donna Johns said. “Why that’s gone is beyond me.”
Supporters and critics alike of the 2018 legislation say repealing it now will restore the status quo on beaches statewide that existed then, but not necessarily the peace.
“These are already existing public rights,” said Katie Bauman, Florida policy director for the Surfrider Foundation. “The local ordinances were protecting that existing right.”
“I would say it makes it a little easier for the local governments to try to establish customary use,” said J. David Breemer, a senior attorney in California with the Pacific Legal Foundation. “But it certainly doesn’t give them a blank check or easy path to do that.”
His property rights law firm is backing property owners in Redington Beach and supported the 2018 law.
State Sen. Jay Trumbull, sponsor of the Senate legislation this year, said most messages he gets from residents of his district are about beach access. He recalled walking and fishing unimpeded along Walton County’s beaches as a boy. But his children cannot do that now.
“What we are trying to accomplish is give people the opportunity to utilize Florida’s most significant resource, our beaches, and allow those to be for everyone and not a select few,” Trumbull said.
