As I pointed out in this blog post, it appears as if several of the parcels west of the state park and East of the Alabama state line in Perdido Key in District 1 of Escambia County had an original title that did NOT preserve the public's right to access the beach upon this property's transfer from the Federal Government to a few private citizens in 1926.. This is a setback, but it is what it is.
So no matter what happens with any or all of the rest of the property deeds to the lots on Perdido Key--we have already locked down a fairly significant win for the public at large that has, for too many years, been barred from accessing beaches they were always entitled to utilize.
So it is a mixed bag thus far, but mostly positive.
Citizen Michael McCormack took the information from the Calvin Coolidge signed public land patent we uncovered monday and put it in the drawing above. Sadly--it appears as if there is no provision for public beach access in the parcels within this original grant depicted above.....
5 comments:
Commissioner Bergosh, could very well be the case, but nonetheless it's important to ask the following: Have you been provided with the full chain of title, from start to finish, on this section of beach, including all the supporting documentation concerning the original plat books?
I agree with Michael that it would seem this section might not be public. But I've learned the hard way not to swallow a couple of pages from a bigger document, not to mention system of documents, and take it as face value. I'd like to see the entire original grant and any supporting documentation...is the County Attorney going to provide that?
Also, why is Tim Day doing so much of the work of turning things over to you? Steven West was the real estate attorney for the County during the (we know now) fiasco on getting easements from properties that might not have even needed it. I don't understand why "these things are difficult to find" is an acceptable answer. BTW, did anybody ever call Fulton County?
Also--what is the process for hiring the company to provide abstracts?
Commissioner Bergosh,
It has come to our attention that there likely will be a vote on May 4th to limit the number of no trespassing signs on Perdido Key beachfront property to one sign. Please be advised and forewarned that any ordinance limiting no trespassing signs to less than 4 signs would be in conflict with Florida State Statutes - Title XLVI, Chapter 810, BURGLARY AND TRESPASS. Also, the current ordinance limiting no trespassing signs to 3 should be rescinded.
Who's "our", Jonathan? You, Doug, and the pretend supporters in your heads?
Basically the same post, with the same verbiage and statute citation, that you made over on ECW when the sign stuff first started. So thanks for giving everybody the opportunity to ROFL a second time.
Not necessarily about the statute; who knows what a judge would decide about this or anything else these days. But that you still think anyone but the dopes over on ECW give a crap about anything you or Doug have to say, and then on top of it, you don't even have the guts to simply post under your name. What are you so afraid of?
With the passing years, the whole program you and Doug were running just becomes more and more pathetic and lunatic, and never more than now as you both hold onto the shreds of it for dear life. Embrace irrelevance, Jonathan. You're far better off if the memories of everything you and Doug perpetrated together fades from people's minds entirely.
I don't know what the outcome is going to be with Grand Caribbean/Sandy Key/Parasol, but I'm anxious to hear. I've been in touch with a few people over there recently and learned that GC people have sometimes been referred to as "roaches" by the folks at Parasol. They don't want the "roaches" anywhere near THEIR beach. We never experienced that when we owned at GC but most of the time we bypassed Parasol and the other condos going East and just walked into the National Seashore. I do know there were not as many "Private Property" signs behind Parasol when we owned at GC as there are now.
I also looked back at my pictures from before we purchased (2018, I think) and there was a partial boardwalk between Sandy Key and Parasol and then it kind of dropped off into the sand and there were a bunch of sandbags being used as steps. It was functional but not pretty. The mobi-mat was added post-Sally and paid for by GC, from what I was told. It's interesting that the original walkway there was wider but the new(est) boardwalk was made narrower because Parasol wanted a buffer between the walkway and their fence. How wide is the actual swath from the end of the boardwalk to the water?
@ 5:07, there shouldn't be ANY signs there. I sound like a broken record (and have for years) but no one, NO ONE!!!!!!, should own the beach. Coastal property is not like other property. It's a finite resource and should be available for use by everyone.
Commissioner, I'm rooting for you on this one.
Alice, I would really love to hear your opinion on--pipe dream--what you think should be done with that access, as somebody who is intimately familiar with it and not biased towards private ownership of the beach.
When we got ahold of the video of Doug telling the PKA he was going to shut that public access down, we thought about just letting go about it, and focusing on Beach Access 4 as the more important battle. I'm glad we didn't, as it turned out to be a relatively easy thing to save--the Board simply reminded Doug that he couldn't shut that access down without a vote, and that was that.
But Randy Cudd said at the time that of all the accesses, that one was a hopeless mess given the overdevelopment around it, so we were just trying to forestall anything permanent being decided there until a more reasonable commissioner was overseeing things.
For a while, Sherri Myers was travelling down to Perdido Key to document ADA issues, because the RESTORE Universal Access project has been perpetually stalled out. She called me the first day she went out and had just hit Access 1, and was livid and appalled at the conditions there. I explained that nothing was going to get better for a while; she suggested that perhaps at some point the public function of Beach Access 1 should be set aside for officially disabled public only, since it was so overcrowded and it was the first access off the bridge. We talked about how crammed on people were to the wet sand there, and how perhaps the focus could be on mobi mats and ADA restrooms and parking while directing the rest of the public to accesses 2 through 4, once 4 was opened.
Now we've got a scenario where it seems like we will at LEAST have those 60+ plats with the 75 foot perpetual public easement. If that opened for public use, what do you think should happen with Access 1?
BTW, I don't know if it's because of my eternal hardheadedness or my eternal skepticism, but if I was an attorney that really cared about public access, I'd be looking at that judge's ruling from the 70s and seeing whether there was a way to open that back up again.
I get it; possession nine tenths of the law etc. And the order is *very* specific; whoever set that up certainly had their legal ducks in a row (ahem). I just have a hard time in letting go of the mentality to look for *every* legal remedy possible on every single plat. The public will lose some, for sure, so I'm not in a piecemeal sort of mood on it. And you never know which way a judge is going to go, and can never predict outcomes in such things.
If the County Attorney's office was willing to fight for the public on this one, I'd be interested to hear what legal options are even available, if any, for revisiting that case. It seems clear that MRTA frowns upon not honoring original easements if part of the easement was still used. Also, if there were photo documentation or other proof that "people have never used this easement anyway" was BS, could that decision be overturned? (That's an honest question...I have no idea.)
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