Developers and landowners have gone so far as to erect bulkheads and even seawalls on the beach itself in many cases, these impediments in the public’s path still remain.
City and county officials sympathetic to large landowners agreed to close portions of the beach to traffic that ploy was more successful and in portions of the coast has created what amounts to a private beach. Landowners posted signs declaring the beach private property those too came down. Landowners fenced off the beach the courts made them take the barricades down.
SLICE OF SEA .COM SERIES
As a result, landowners and the public have been embroiled in a never-ending series of conflicts since development of the Texas coast began in earnest in the late Fifties. Over the years, through some obscure legal theories like prescriptive easements and implied dedication, the public has acquired a legal right to use the private beach−at least in Texas.
That may sound confusing, but it’s the case nevertheless, and once again we have the common law to thank. So the beach is private−but it’s also public. Despite how crowded the beach may look on a typical summer weekend, every inch of it, right down to the water, is privately owned. But it has unfortunately survived to haunt us in this current era of land developers and subdivisions and condominiums. This rule of law was harmless enough in an age when leisure time was scarce and the beach was used mostly by fishermen drying their nets. The early common law decreed that private property bordering on the sea extended right down to the waterline, including the beach. Like taxation without representation and the divine right of kings, the problem dates back to mercantile England. Still, a lot of people seem to like it, and it seems a shame that they’ll have to find some place else to go. So maybe I’m the wrong person to be pointing out that what others have called Texas’ finest recreational resource may not be around much longer. You won’t find it in Guinness, but I believe I hold a record of sorts: I grew up in Galveston, two blocks from the Gulf of Mexico, and managed to go seven years−from the fifth grade through high school−without once setting foot on the beach.
0 kommentar(er)
