EDITORIAL: Ida's beach dilemma: No easy fix (PHOTOS)

This editorial appeared in our sister paper, The Northwest Florida Daily News.

Photos of a buckled parking lot and a breached sea wall on Destin’s Holiday Isle have again focused attention on our region’s eroding beaches. Indeed, a reader in Miramar Beach writes today that erosion caused by Tropical Storm Ida should be “a wake-up call for those protesting beach restoration.”

We wish it were that simple.

Emerald Coast residents have argued for years over “renourishing” beaches with trucked-in sand, how to go about it and who should pay for it.

They’ve complained that the sand used to rebuild area beaches is too dark or too dirty.

They’ve complained that beachfront owners are unfairly singled out when it comes to paying for restoration — or, alternatively, that people who live inland are made to share the burden when they don’t benefit from beach ownership.

They’ve complained most bitterly that because a beach rebuilt with public funds is considered public property, restoration violates beachfront owners’ property rights.

Last fall, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that restoration of beaches in Destin and Walton County in 2007 didn’t violate anyone’s property rights. The court said the state has a duty to protect its shores and can add sand to critically eroded beaches.

Even that didn’t stop the squabbling. Okaloosa Island residents recently engaged in a tug of war with Destin residents over who should receive sand dredged from Destin Harbor. For now, the sand appears headed to Okaloosa Island. Said a Destin condo manager: “We’re not happy they’re taking the sand and not letting us have any.”

In a perfect world, most of these problems could be solved if owners of private beaches would stop relying on a government program, shoulder the responsibility, buy their own sand and rebuild their own shorelines as they please. That would settle the question of who pays — you own it, you fix it — and no one would grumble that the government was taking their property.

Clean and simple. That’s the kind of wake-up call we’d like to wake up to.

For a photo gallery of Ida's aftermath in Destin, click here.