From sea to shining sea, sunbathers vs. property owners
A year after Hurricane Alicia walloped the Texas coast around Galveston last summer, the storm has not entirely abated. Having weathered natural disaster, some 140 beachfront-property owners are facing an even worse legal catastrophe. Texas law gives the public the right to use all the beach in the corridor between the sea at low tide and the natural vegetation line. The violent winds and rain of Hurricane Alicia tore away such large chunks of land that private, $100,000 homes are no longer sitting on privately controlled property. When officials moved in to claim the land for sunbathers and fishermen and to require that some of the houses be abandoned without any state compensation, the homeowners' wrath easily matched that of Alicia. A maelstrom of lawsuits is still raging.
Such beach battles are by no means unusual. From sea to shining sea, landlocked citizens are asserting what in many states is their traditional right of access to the beaches, even if they have to tramp across private property to get there. At the same time, property owners, especially wealthy residents of exclusive beachfront communities, are becoming increasingly militant about the invasion of beachgoers. In Maine's high-priced coastal enclaves, property owners, many of them from out of state, have built fences, thrown rocks, towed cars and on at least one occasion brandished a shotgun to keep clammers, fishermen and would-be sunbathers off their land. On the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, a summer retreat for some of the East Coast's most prominent lawyers and businessmen, homeowners have begun hiring private guards to confine outsiders to relatively crowded stretches of public beach.
But nationally, the trend is otherwise; courts and new laws are gradually eroding private beaches. Earlier this year, for instance, the New Jersey Supreme Court took note of "the increasing demand for our state's beaches" and held that they are a "public trust" to which private-property rights must give way. The theory is a groundbreaking, potentially sweeping one. Courts in Oregon, Florida and Hawaii have also upheld beach access under the more legally traditional "doctrine of custom." When the beaches have always been open to the public, these courts have held, they must remain so. In Hawaii a tough law forced even the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, one of the world's poshest resorts, to build an access path to the beach for the public. The hotel, however, has reduced the flow of ordinary tourists by charging high parking fees. Such indirect attempts to limit beach-going crowds are common. Resort towns often impose parking restrictions and stiff bridge and beach tolls for nonresidents. But these too are being attacked. In Florida this month, Governor Bob Graham authorized local officials in St. Augustine to press a lawsuit challenging beach tolls.