EDITORIAL: For beach restoration critics, this is your golden opportunity

There comes a time when you have to lay your cards on the table and show your hand.

That time is now for David Sherry and his Okaloosa Island contingent, which have successfully kept sand off of the eroded shores of Holiday Isle.

For more than a year we have listened to the outcry and watched the hand-wringing as Sherry and others said that Okaloosa Island doesn’t need its beaches restored. The sand would be too dark, they yelled. The funding formula is unfair, they clamored.

They even sued the county to have their beaches removed from the Municipal Services Benefit Unit, the special taxing district that would assess Okaloosa Island and Destin homeowners for beach renourishment.

As plans to restore the beach stalled, a vicious one-two punch came from off-season storms and made places like Destin Pointe, Jetty East and Holiday Isle Surf & Racquet Club look like they were clobbered by a Cat-3.

Desperate homeowners hoped for some relief from the sand that is to be dredged days from now from East Pass, but Sherry and his group blocked that hope, too — all but ensuring that the sand will be dumped on a desolate shore a short distance away from where it’s truly needed.

The whole thing came to a head at Tuesday’s Okaloosa County Commission meeting where Holiday Isle homeowners again appealed for the sand stop-gap. County leaders ultimately sat on their hands, but they did ask the ultimate question of Sherry and his crowd: “Just what do you want here?”

There was no straight answer.

This is the Sherrys’ golden opportunity to relinquish their grip on sand they don’t need. They could ask the commission to give Holiday Isle the sand but pull them out of the MSBU — scoring a major victory for the many they claim to represent.

Our greatest worry is that the filibusterers’ mentality is summed up by no-compromise online commenters like “Da Man” who writes, “David Sherry for mayor, council person, and commissioner all rolled into one. The little people of Okaloosa Island stood up to the JE and DP bullies …”

The concept of the storm-ravaged Jetty East and Destin Pointe being bullies is laughable. Beggars are rarely bullies, and that is what much of Holiday Isle has been reduced to.