People should know when they buy a beachfront lot, they're buying the view, not the beach. :roll:
Now that is an interesting statement. If the deed reads mean high water mark as the boundary, they ARE buying the beach, but not necessarily with exclusive use. The reason I bring this up is because as I understand it, if a beach goer is injured on that "privately owned" property, the owner of the property may be paying damages if taken to court.
That is what is so crazy for me to understand. The property owners claiming rights to the beach, have been allowing the public to use the beach, without objection for years, though if the public is injured on that property, the owner may be liable. Also, the property owner is going to pay taxes based on the assessed taxable value, which is usually directly tied to the size of the parcel. I see at least two very big ways a Gulf front owner could benefit by quit claiming the lower beach elevation of the property, and it seems that they are essentially not losing anything, since the public has always been using that property anyway. I really don't understand their side, and would love to hear an objection to the above thought.
If the property owner IS sued for damages resulting from an accident on that beach property, I bet the property owner's attorney argues that the beach property is really the public's, due to case law, as the one I previously posted. That is the irony -- the private Gulf front property owners may be the biggest proponent of public beach, if they are sued for damages. Can you imagine a top notch professional football player, stepping into a deep hole on the beach, snapping his leg in two, never again able to play football? With an annual salary of $10 million, and 15 more years of playing time, that is going to be one hefty lawsuit of damages.
If you go online and look at plats, you can see that some parcels go to the mean high-water line, and some do not. Like SJ says, the owners of the former pay taxes on that property. In trying to look at it from the point of view of these owners, how can they not have the viewpoint that they own that property? They are buying the beach because that is included in the acreage that they purchased and pay taxes on.
To address the issue of customary use, things have really changed since we first started coming to the area. There weren't the high-density developments north of County Highway 30A that there are now. Back then I wouldn't think that beachfront owners would have minded small numbers of people flowing over into their property from the public accesses. Fast forward to 2008. Now with the proliferation of these high-density developments, there are larger numbers of people from these developments using the public (and private if there's no gate) accesses and thus larger numbers of people flowing over into private property for which, as SJ pointed out, the owner faces liability issues.
In my opinion "customary" is relative. The customs from the past don't relate at all to the situation now because things are different due to higher volumes of people visiting the area and not staying at condos/homes with private beach walkovers.
Someone in Saturday's Walton Sun was complaining that the Planning Commission should approve more projects because the economy is so bad and that people in the development/construction industries need jobs. Isn't that how this whole problem of beach use started? That is, because Planning and then the BCC didn't appear to totally think through the repercussions of approving these high-density developments and approved developments that should never have been approved, these growth issues have occurred?
I'm just trying to look at things from the point of view of a beachfront owner which I am not. It sucks to pay for property and have a boatload of people with all of their beach junk in your front yard (those homes face the beach). Yet it also sucks that people come to "the beach" to vacation and can't use the beach as they once did.
I probably shouldn't post this. Too inflammatory of an issue. There are probably more people who disagree with me than agree. Please don't slam me.