With overwhelming majorities in both House and Senate sending HB631 to Governor Scott and his signing of that bill into law today, perhaps our county attorney and BCC will take the time to read and understand the new law. The County Attorney clearly misunderstood the requirements of the bill when she misinformed the BCC at its last meeting.
The BCC clearly violated the Constitutional rights of beachfront owners both with the CU ordinance and with the overturned portion of the Beach Activities Ordinance. Fortunately, to date the BCC has not fulfilled Sara's stated intent to spend 40 or 50 million dollars in attorney and court costs if that's what it takes, to only slightly paraphrase her public statement in DFS at BCC meeting before this debacle was voted in.
Unfortunately, the BCC has squandered many hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney and consultant fees and God only knows how much in staff time in this unfortunate exercise. Let's hope the BCC takes a more informed, cooler and legal look before stepping on its sensitive, gender-specific body parts so publicly again. Every taxpayer in this county deserves much better than we have received from 4 of them.
The 4 elements of CU remain precisely as they have always been. HB631 did not change those requirements at all. It merely requires that local governments statewide must provide the procedural due process afforded by the CU common law requirement that only a judge may declare CU and only after finding that the local govt petitioning for that declaration has borne the burden of proof in the entirety to the satisfaction of the court. This was the law before the BCC overstepped so badly, and it remains the law now, only now both acc. to case law and state statute.
Citizens should never have been required to sue for overturning such a clearly unconstitutional act by the BCC. Let us hope this is the last such instance. We have better ways to spend time and money, public and private.
