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Customary Use of SoWal Beaches: Contact Governor Scott

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Good post with good points @FactorFiction. Thank you. We need to all protect and care for our beaches either way. Keeping them pristine and beautiful and wide open for beach lovers. I am concerned about vendors and anyone with massive amounts of chairs, umbrellas, tents, loud music trash, etc. more than anything else.
 
Teresa said:
Good post with good points @FactorFiction. Thank you. We need to all protect and care for our beaches either way. Keeping them pristine and beautiful and wide open for beach lovers. I am concerned about vendors and anyone with massive amounts of chairs, umbrellas, tents, loud music trash, etc. more than anything else.
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Understanding that the 50% vendor allocation of public beach accesses has been discussed in the past, can ANYBODY share who is in agreement with this besides the beach vendors and the BCC who voted for this? Seems to me, the public should be fighting like crazy to take back what is unquestionably already theirs / ours, especially considering the finite resource. What is the rationale behind all this?
 
BlueMtnBeachVagrant said:
Understanding that the 50% vendor allocation of public beach accesses has been discussed in the past, can ANYBODY share who is in agreement with this besides the beach vendors and the BCC who voted for this? Seems to me, the public should be fighting like crazy to take back what is unquestionably already theirs / ours, especially considering the finite resource. What is the rationale behind all this?
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Every one and his brother knows why the 50% beach allocation has stuck around...supporting C. Jones children is a must for taxpayers...just ask her.

I think if people could actually use what has historically been public access (without having to show up at 6 am in the morning to claim a spot on the beach) the rest of this would actually diffuse itself and you wouldn't see people trying to squat on private property.

Vendors should only be allowed to set up as they have clients to actually fill the chairs and I think they should actually have to pay a renters fee every year based on the actual number of chairs rented. They should not be allowed to mark their territory either...the beach belongs to all of us.
 
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.
 
Kaydence said:
Every one and his brother knows why the 50% beach allocation has stuck around...supporting C. Jones children is a must for taxpayers...just ask her.
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I've also have read as much but why in the world would other BCC members vote for this? I can understand why a commissioner would vote for customary use - it's "good business" in terms of getting re-elected. But for a commissioner to vote and take away such a scarce commodity like EXISTING public beach to the tune of 50% just absolutely blows me away.

If you have to pay a private entity to sit on that half of the beach, then it's no longer public.

Where is all the outrage? If customary use proponents were to put just a fraction of effort in reversing the public beach vending debacle as they did in getting customary use originally passed, it wouldn't take any time for the commissioners to reverse themselves.

And the public access vendors sing, "This sand was your sand, this sand is my sand...."

Danny Glidewell, if you're reading, where do you stand with this? TIA
 
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BlueMtnBeachVagrant said:
I've also have read as much but why in the world would other BCC members vote for this? I can understand why a commissioner would vote for customary use - it's "good business" in terms of getting re-elected. But for a commissioner to vote and take away such a scarce commodity like EXISTING public beach to the tune of 50% just absolutely blows me away.

If you have to pay a private entity to sit on that half of the beach, then it's no longer public.

Where is the all the outrage? If customary use proponents were to put just a fraction of effort in reversing the public beach vending debacle as they did in getting customary use originally passed, it wouldn't take any time for the commissioners to reverse themselves.

And the public access vendors sing, "This sand was your sand, this sand is my sand...."

Danny Glidewell, if you're reading, where do you stand with this? TIA
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My pet peeve has always been the 50% given to beach vendors FOR FREE! People pay to come, pay to stay, pay to eat and shop but can't cop a squat on the beach they paid to come here to visit and then have to pay for a seat on multi million dollar property that vendors are given FREE!

Totally absurd logic but hopefully many folks have finally figured out there is no logic with this BCC! The MAJOROTY of them are mentally challenged. Vote them out!
 
I would wager that the Walton County BCC members that voted for the Customary Use ordinance are not the least bit embarrassed by being slapped down by an overwhelming majority of the State legislature.
 
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