SC to Decide if Idle Rich's Scenic Ocean Views More Important than Public Beaches, the Environment

[marmar]

Supremes to Decide if Idle Rich's Scenic Ocean Views More Important than Public Beaches, the Environment

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 2:15 PM on November 24, 2009.

A popular coastal reclamation program is being threatened by short-sighted scumbags.



Here's a story about a fascinating legal question being driven to the highest court in the land by selfish and short-sighted Florida real estate scumbags developers looking to cash in on the bloated snow-bird second-homers who come to crisp themselves alive on the coasts of the Sunshine State (and real estate developers, as everyone knows, don't come greedier or sleazier than the Florida variety):

The sugar-white sand that stretches from Slade and Nancy Lindsay's deck to the clear, green waters of the Gulf of Mexico is some of the finest in the world. Tiny, uniformly shaped quartz crystals make the beach that stretches along the Florida Panhandle unique, experts say.

So what could be wrong with creating more of it?

That is what Florida's beach restoration and renourishment program has been doing statewide for years, pumping in wide new strips of sand to save eroding shorelines.

But the Lindsays and other homeowners challenged the program because it comes with a catch: The new strips of beach belong to the public, not the property owners. They feared their waterfront view of bleached sand and sea oats would include throngs of strangers toting umbrellas and coolers.

The Florida Supreme Court disagreed that the homeowners' property rights had been infringed upon just because their waterfront property line may not actually touch the water.

And that decision, in turn, has created a new challenge from the landowners: that the state high court ditched 100 years of common law to endorse the popular beach renourishment program, depriving them of their constitutional rights.

It is the latter charge that created the unusual case that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear next week. Justices will examine a concept they have pondered for more than 40 years without resolution: whether a decision by the judicial branch, rather than the executive or legislative, can create the kind of taking of private property forbidden by the Constitution.

"It's one of the great open questions" in property law, said D. Benjamin Barros, a law professor at Widener University who edits a blog on such topics. The importance of the issue of whether a judicial decision "can eliminate important property rights and leave the owner without a remedy" will only increase with the growing number of public-private disputes over waterfront property, he said.

Florida's beach renourishment and restoration program has operated for 30 years without such a claim. That is not surprising, because most often the money is spent on coastline ravaged by erosion and hurricanes. Homeowners are generally glad for the help.

But the response was different in parts of Destin, the self-proclaimed "world's luckiest fishing village." About 125 boats still leave the harbor each day in search of amberjack, red snapper, grouper and a local delicacy called scamp, City Manager Greg Kisela said. But the real catch these days is developers and tourism.

One of the reasons I could never be a straight news journalist is that as interesting as the legal questions raised in this case may be, it'd make me batty to have to hand in a couple of thousand words on it without pointing out some context.

Here we a popular program reclaiming coastline "ravaged by erosion and hurricanes" -- a real environmental good. It's popular, and results in nice public beaches.

And it's effectively a subsidy for those wealthy enough to own property on the Florida coast -- paid for as much by the poor folks in Liberty City who won't ever get near a pristine white-sand beach as it is by those in the "world's luckiest fishing village."

And yet that's not good enough for some of those lucky duckies, who'd take their inalienable natural right to an ocean view unobstructed by pasty tourists all the way to the Supreme Court.


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/144171/supremes_to_decide_if_idle_rich%27s_scenic_ocean_views_more_important_than_public_beaches%2C_the_environment/

[Captain Hilts]

1. VA Beach makes city taxpayers pay for sand for limited-access beaches. nt

[marmar]

2. Ridiculous.....Why do we put up with it?

nt

[Captain Hilts]

3. It's the ultimate welfare for the wealthy, but the political system keeps military and

minorities off the city council. It's dominated by developers and doctors.

[John N Morgan]

6. I don't think it's "the system" is anybody running a modern campaign?

Or are they trying the old "dump money on radio and teevee"? methods. Real people don't stand a chance at that game. So, change the game. I've got $87 and 2 weeks into building a campaign in a very red district.
BTW: the candidacy is not officially announced (January looks good). I'm building a web presence that I can use to "energize" my base. Democrats are smart people. When you can't win by status-quo methods, get outside the box.

I that light if you care to google bomb my site I'd appreciate it.

John Morgan Democratic Candidate For Florida House of Representatives, District 82

[Captain Hilts]

7. At large voting makes campaigns too expensive for most folks - intentionally. nt

[Laelth]

9. Welcome to DU, and good luck! n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[John N Morgan]

11. Indeed, an unknown unfunded Dem candidate in a red district, yeah I'll take luck.

And some web visibility.

[arcadian]

13. and the mob.

It's long been known that VB is a laundering location for mobsters.

[valerief]

5. They control the men with guns. nt

[valerief]

4. Our Supreme Court? Verdict affects the rich? Hmm, I know the outcome already. nt

[begin_within]

8. There have been battles over this issue for years in California.

California state law says that any beach area between the water and the mean high tide line is public property. They even require easements for beach access, even in some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. But wealthy beachfront property owners have battled against public access, most notoriously on Broad Beach in Malibu. They erected fences and put up signs and hired private security guards to shoo away trespassers on what they believed to be "their beach." Unfortunately for them one beachgoer they tried to shoo away was a California Coastal Commission member herself, who was prepared for the guards with documentation. Music and movie mogul David Geffen was involved in one dispute that ended with an easement and path being built on his property. The battles raged on for many years, all of it faithfully documented by the L.A. Times. Eventually a settlement was made with the California Coastal Commission publishing guidelines specific to Broad Beach, even on a lot-by-lot basis. I'm sure this dispute in Florida will take a long time and probably end with nobody happy.

[Dreamer Tatum]

I smell it coming: Kelo is good if it screws rich people. Otherwise, it's bad.

Pretty frickin' typical.

[Atman]

10. I grew up on a Florida sandbar that probably shouldn't be there any longer.

But this was an important sandbar -- Cocoa Beach. Dormitory community to the Kennedy Space Center (aka Cape Canaveral, also the name of the neon honky-tonk cruise port town of t-shirt shops and mega-mini-golf courses full of fat, bright-pink New Yorkers trying to putt through a fake cerulean waterfall, up the ass of a giant plastic alligator).

Cocoa Beach is a barrier island. That designation means something, much to the surprise of so many of the people who live in such places (there are many, from Texas to North Caroline). It's essentially a sandbar. A migrating sandbar. It's purpose is to protect the mainland from the ravages of ocean currents. As currents rush silt, sand and sea-shells up and down the coast, the sandbar shifts. It moves. But people still build houses on these moving sandbars. When I left Cocoa Beach in the mid eighties, beachfront residents were at the point of collecting old Christmas trees in January to dump on the dunes in the hope that they'd collect the south-bound sand and stop the migration. Of course, it didn't work.

A few years ago my wife and I returned to Cocoa Beach and stayed at a friend's beachfront condo --- there was a humongous off-shore rig, much like an oil drilling platform, humming (loudly) 24/7 as it pumped sand from the ocean floor a half-mile out and deposited it on the eroding beach. The amazing thing was, it was working. It was evident when we watched the beach "grow" a little bit every day we were there. It was weird.

I was back again this passed August. The beach is massive. The wooden walkways erected years ago to protect the fragile dunes were now half-buried in sun-bleached sand. The condos that had salt water lapping at their sea walls a decade ago are now separated from the strand by 30 yards of sea oats and sand spurs.

How much tax money was spent to do this? And whose tax money was it? I can't deny the fact that my growing up in Cocoa Beach makes it hard to be impartial. I'm glad the sandbar was restored, and the space center and air force base won't be washed into the Atlantic any time soon. But really --- maybe they should have been. A long time ago. Because as the op points out, WHY should people in Kansas pay to restore the backyard playgrounds of people in Cocoa Beach?

Oh, wait...why should people in Cocoa Beach (or Texas or Cape Hatteras) have to pay taxes to help out people in Kansas just because they chose to build houses in tornado zones? Hmmm. Maybe because that's the nature of "community." Shared risk -- we all put a little bit into the pot and we're all covered if one of us is affected by a natural disaster.

Except, building in one of these high risks zones is, well...high risk. You can't really call erosion or tornadoes "natural disasters," can you? It all just gets too damn complicated. I don't wanna pay for ANYTHING, dammit. 'cept for maybe a six pack and a bag of weed.

:)

.

[arcadian]

14. Same exact thing happened in VB

Right down to the Christmas trees and off shore dredging activity. It used to be not so bad, the area in the south end where the hotels and boardwalk are always needed to be replenished with sand. The north end had an area where they left some of the sand dunes so it was always the nicest beach, but the stupid tourists always wanted to be around the fakey beach experience of the south end, where the 15 story hotels built right up to the beach created a palisade and blocked out the sun on the beach at around 3:00 every afternoon.

Somebody in their infinite wisdom decided that the best idea was to create a seawall at the south end, thinking that this would solve all the problems. It has for the short term, but the beach looks completely unnatural now because they ramped up the dredging operation and the beach is now about a hundred yards wide even up to the nice old dune area at the north end. What they don't get is that all that sand will be washed/blown away eventually because of the seawall. And they are always looking for new sources of sand for the beach. I remember they used to barge it in from other states at some times. Idiots.

[arcadian]

12. They wouldn't have to replenish the beach if they din't build their homes on top of sand dunes.

The idiots. But they destroyed the dunes so they could be closer to the beach and every winter storm carries the beach away along with it. The sand dunes are the natural replenishers for the beach, there is a reason why they are there.