Property Lines - A Stake in the Sand - NYTimes.com
This “nourishment” program, which involves an expensive process of dredging and pumping submerged sand back onto beaches, has been around for four decades and is one of Florida’s more popular public initiatives, a lifeline for many communities in a tourism-dependent state. So it came as a great surprise when, in Destin, the prospect of restoring the shore ran into fierce opposition. The battle over the beach, featuring charges of extremism, selfishness and dirty dealing, started as a typical squabble at town hall. But last December, it culminated with an argument before the United States Supreme Court.
The legal case is complicated, but at its crux, it presents a conflict between private property rights and the public interest, one in which the court is weighing abstruse issues of eroding and accreting power. Yet on a practical level, it has left some legal scholars befuddled. Usually, people protest when they’re losing something, not regaining. “One of the great questions,” says Benjamin Barros, a law professor at Widener University who has closely followed the case, “is why would a beachfront property owner oppose beach nourishment?” To answer that, you have to know the history of another question, one that has long bedeviled Destin: who owns that covetable sand? ...