Public Beach or Private? Homeowners in Florida Draw a Line in the Sand

Walton County’s 26 miles of coastline in Florida’s panhandle are like something out of a postcard: soft, sugar-white sand and emerald green water.

It has 16 beachside communities with charming names like Seagrove and Seaside, which is where “The Truman Show” was filmed. On summer nights, families gather at Blue Mountain Beach Creamery for homemade waffle cones and at the food trucks on Airstream Row for hot dogs and Hawaiian shave ice.

South Walton—as this southern slice of the county along the Gulf of Mexico is known—is the quintessential beach getaway.

But below the surface, tensions are running high.

Around half of Walton County’s beaches are private, usable only by residents and guests of specific beachfront homes, condominiums, resorts and communities.

Those who don’t have private beaches can get to public stretches of sand at three state parks or through public access points scattered throughout the coastline’s neighborhoods and nestled between private properties.

Beachgoers on the smaller slabs of public beach and along the perimeters of the larger ones have to keep an eye out for private-property signs—and sometimes security guards—blocking off areas where they can’t lounge.

Earlier this summer, Georgia resident James Jordan rented a three-bedroom home for his family for four nights for about $3,200 total. With children and beach equipment in tow, the Jordan family used the public beach access most convenient to their rental. By midday, the public beach it led to was swarming with people.

“In one word: crowded,” said the 32-year-old father of three. “The hardest part was you could look across this imaginary line and see unused beach.”

Arguments over public versus private beaches have popped up in coastal communities across the country. The nearly decadelong debate plaguing South Walton is a hot-button topic in county meetings, on local Facebook pages and at area watering holes. It centers around one question: Should the public’s past use of beaches trump private-property rights?

For some, South Walton’s private beaches are what first drew them to the area. Eric Wilhelm, founder of two supply-chain companies based in Atlanta, began vacationing along the coastline with his family in the 1990s because he felt its private beaches were quieter and safer than other nearby vacation destinations.

He said they made the “very conscious decision” to spend more money on rentals that have private beaches. Wilhelm, 64, now owns two multimillion-dollar properties along the coastline with private beaches.

‘Doubled in size’

It isn’t unusual in Florida or other parts of the country, like Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, to have both private and public beaches. Residents and regular visitors to these areas generally know which walkways they can take to the shore, watch for signs to know where they can’t lounge, and are versed in terminology like “mean high-water line,” which marks how far up the sand the water typically comes at high tide. Sand below the line—essentially the “wet sand”— is public in Florida and can be used to cross over private beach property.

Beach rights didn’t used to be such a controversial issue in Walton County, where miles of sand have long been privately owned.

Longtime beachgoers—like Jordan, who visited the area when he was a kid—recall when South Walton had less development and fewer people. Back then, beachfront owners rarely shooed beachgoers off their properties, he said. But ongoing development and marketing has boosted the area’s popularity and brought more visitors and high-end buyers to its coastline.

As of 2023, there were around 83,300 people living in Walton County, twice the estimated 40,600 in 2000, according to the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research. During the height of the tourism seasons, visitors and inland residents descend upon the coastline. Last summer, Walton County hosted over 2.3 million tourists.

“We’re living in a community that has doubled in size in the 20 years we’ve lived here,” said Ronnie McBrayer, 53, who lives with his wife in the Walton County city of Freeport, around 15 miles inland. They share a small beachfront condo with their extended family on the western end of the coastline, where there are long stretches of public beach.

During the height of summer, “there are so many people crammed in down there that you can’t really enjoy it,” said his wife, Cindy McBrayer, 56. The pair said they believe the public should have access to all of the county’s coastline.

Lawsuits, heated political rhetoric and state legislation have carved a deep divide in recent years. Gulf-front owners say they feel unfairly villainized for wanting to keep the public off the private properties they have paid for, while longtime public beachgoers yearn for the days when they could spread out because property rights were rarely enforced.

County officials declined to comment for this article about the continuing beach-usage debate.

Viral videos

Hostile turf disputes were rare before the mid-2010s.

“There was really not a big problem. Most of us, myself included, as beachfront owners, it just wasn’t something we worried about all the time,” said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who completed the construction of his former Gulf-front property in Walton County in 2011.

“If there were people who came down on the beach where it was our property, we didn’t care as long as they weren’t doing really nefarious things like dumping litter or putting big tents up so we couldn’t enjoy it ourselves,” he said.

There were a few hard-liners who would call if just one or two people were on their property, according to Michael Adkinson, who has been county sheriff since 2009. There were also a handful of public beachgoers who would protest anything from a “private property” sign to a verbal request to move.

“Most people were in the middle and reasonable,” he said. “The ones who weren’t got all the attention.”

Today, videos circulate online of confrontations when public beachgoers are told to move off private property. Some beachfront owners say they avoid telling people where they live when they are out in public.

So far this summer, Adkinson’s office has fielded upward of 100 calls over property disputes. However, jagged property lines and a lack of continuity between public and private sand have made it difficult for his team to tell where boundaries begin and end, he said.

Development boom

The transformation of Walton County’s sleepy coastline into a vacation hot spot took off following the completion in the 1970s of Scenic Highway 30A, which runs along the county’s shoreline. The road helped spur more development, which eventually turned the county into a tourism magnet with luxury Gulf-front homes and millions of visitors each year.

The South Walton tourist development tax, which is collected from visitors on short-term rentals, brought in more than twice as much money in fiscal 2023 than in 2015, assuming a constant base tax rate. At the current 5% rate, the total collected last fiscal year topped $60 million.

Property values have been increasing as well. An eight-bedroom circa-2022 beachfront home, for example, is on the market for $18.495 million. It sold as a vacant lot in 2016 for about $2.6 million, up from the $50,000 it fetched in 1977.

In 2013, the county agreed to move forward with the Department of the Army on a nourishment project that would have added new sand to roughly 19 miles of its beaches to ease erosion. Some locals were excited about the project because the newly expanded part of the dry-sand beach would be usable by the public, including the new stretches of sand between private owners and the water.

Some beachfront owners, like Huckabee, felt the project was, in part, a backdoor scheme to take control of more beaches. There was also a worry that large crowds on the new patches of sand would infringe on their privacy.

“I have had to pay for beach repairs and dune repairs after three hurricanes myself,” said Wilhelm, who felt that his beaches didn’t need nourishment at the time. The next storm that comes “is on me.”

When asked to grant access to their properties for the project, the beachfront homeowners overwhelmingly refused, so it was tabled in early 2016.

“A lot of my neighbors are third-, fourth-generation beach owners down there, and that’s their biggest, biggest asset,” Wilhelm said.

Ordinance backlash

By 2016, the beach-usage debate was heating up. Lawsuits were filed by both sides, public-beach activists were organizing walks on the beach, private-property signs were appearing more frequently and a lawyer in Florida argued beachfront owners have the right to exercise the state’s “stand your ground” law on their property.

In October 2016, Walton County made a bold move: It adopted a customary-use ordinance that granted the public use of the dry sand on all of its beaches, with some rules and regulations. The legal doctrine of customary use, as recognized by the Florida Supreme Court in the 1974 Tona-Roma case, permits public recreation on private property if such use is proven to be ancient, reasonable, without interruption and free from dispute.

The ordinance went into effect in early 2017. It faced immediate backlash from beachfront homeowners who argued it was unconstitutional because the county hadn’t proved in court that their beaches met those four criteria.

“There was a lot of dispute because the landowners were feeling they were about to have their property taken from them by the county with no compensation or even consideration,” said Huckabee, who tried unsuccessfully to compromise with the county on an alternative solution and became a lightning rod for local criticism. “I was better known. I became an easy target,” he said.

After receiving unsolicited offers, Huckabee sold his beachfront home for around $9 million in 2021. He had purchased the empty lot in 2009 for about $800,000, according to property records.

Some beachfront owners filed lawsuits challenging the ordinance, while others, like Wilhelm, waited on the sidelines to see how things played out in court.

In November 2017, in response to one of the lawsuits, a federal court in Pensacola said that the county had the authority to pass the customary-use ordinance, according to David Theriaque, the Tallahassee based-lawyer who wrote the ordinance. About a month later, the beachfront owners involved in the suit filed an appeal. Then the state legislature got involved.

Florida weighs in

In 2018, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that established a legal process local governments must follow if they want to pass a customary-use ordinance for private beach property, voiding Walton County’s ordinance and rendering the Pensacola ruling irrelevant.

The intent was to protect customary-use claims by making sure they are clearly defined through public hearings, according to the bill’s sponsor, Katie Edwards-Walpole, a land-use lawyer and former Florida House representative. “We want people to have an ordinance on the books that’s defendable without going through years and years and years of litigation,” she said.

The bill grandfathered in two other longstanding ordinances in Florida because issues raised on them had already been resolved in court. Walton County, however, had to sue nearly 1,200 private property parcels to prove the existence of customary use on their beaches, according to Will Dunaway, a local lawyer with Clark Partington, which represented more than 70 beachfront owners throughout the litigation.

Tourism trade-off

In 2022, the tourism department had a $10 million marketing budget, and Walton County welcomed around 5.3 million visitors. Real-estate values also jumped. The coastline had a record $25 million home sale that year.

In 2023, the county dropped its suit against most of the nearly 1,200 private beachfront properties with prejudice, meaning it couldn’t be brought back to court. A settlement was reached for several dozen parcels that allows public usage of 20 feet of sand above their mean high water line at specific times and under certain conditions.

Theriaque, the lawyer who represented the county, declined to comment on the county’s decision to drop the suit but said going to trial would have been expensive.

For many beachfront owners, the decision brought relief. They described the roughly five-year suit as expensive, exhausting and the catalyst for ruined relationships with other locals.

Those in favor of democratizing the use of the beaches worry the crowds and confusing landscape will keep visitors from returning.

There were roughly 1.3 million visitors to Walton County this spring, down from about 1.4 million the prior year, the county tourism department reported. According to the report, the annual decrease is due, in part, to international travel and cruises returning to prepandemic levels.

Local public-beach activist Dave Rauschkolb argues that opening private beaches for public use would improve the experiences of visitors and inland residents. The 63-year-old is a longtime county resident and owns several food establishments in the area, including the beachfront restaurant and local staple Bud & Alley’s in Seaside.

On beaches that are reachable by public access points, “I don’t recognize that anyone has the right to exclude anyone,” said Rauschkolb. He founded Florida Beaches For All, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving all of the state’s beaches for public use.

Easing the crowds

Although tensions linger, Walton County is still highly sought after. By 2035, it’s expected to have an estimated population of roughly 106,700, according to the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research. Earlier this year, a beachfront home sold for $28.5 million, setting a new home-sale record for the Florida panhandle.

The county has taken steps to help ease crowding on the beaches. Since 2016 it has used tourism development tax funds to purchase more than $76 million worth of property, including beachfront, to expand public-beach access, usage and parking.

For about a decade, the county has funded free admission to two beachfront state parks in the area from Memorial Day to Labor Day.