Posted on November 5, 2025
Coastal rights attorney Pepper Uchino weighs in on the sand wars.
For decades, there’s been a war along the coast of Florida for the future of our beaches.
On one side of the battlefield is the public. On the other: beachfront private landowners. Each side is vying for what it believes is their right to the sand on our shores. Over the past decade, the public has been on the losing end of the war. As more people move to Florida and buy and build homes on the shore, they want privacy, often putting up “No Trespassing” signs and barricading their back yards with fences and rocks. That means less beach access is available to the public. In Florida, 60 percent of the coast is considered private. In Sarasota, it’s a shocking 80 percent.
The public was dealt a massive blow in 2018, when the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 631. The law reversed the customary use doctrine that gave local governments the right to grant the public access to historically used beaches without having to go to court. Before 2018, the onus was on beachfront property owners, who had to prove in court that they were allowed to kick people off the sand. But after 2018, local governments had to jump through time-consuming and expensive procedural hoops if private property owners laid claim to a beach. It didn’t take long for homeowners to hire private security guards and call police if they saw beachgoers plant a toe or towel on the sand in their back yards.
But in a rare move for the benefit of the public, the Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 1622 this spring, repealing HB 631 and returning the power of customary use to the people. The bill is also intended to speed up beach renourishment projects.
Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated the law last June, saying, “Senate Bill 1622 protects public beach access and streamlines beach restoration in Gulf Coast counties…It is a win for recreation, for tourism and for future generations.”
But how significant a victory is it really?
Coastal rights attorney Pepper Uchino
According to coastal rights attorney Pepper Uchino, president of the Florida Shore and Beach Preservation Association (FSBPA), it’s a start in the right direction.
“Florida recognized that it made a mistake,” Uchino says. “The legislature realized that what it thought was a good idea turned out to be a bad idea and returned some measure of access to its people.”
Uchino points out that in the seven years since the initial reversal of customary use law, there were more than 500 cases that invoked customary use. Prior to 2018, in the nearly 50 years since customary use first passed in 1974, there were only 50 cases.
“There was an exponential explosion in the number of cases because instead of the public having this assumed right to the beach, the private owner had the assumption that
everything was private,” he says. “That’s where the burden was flipped and why it’s so important that it
was reversed.”
And while it’s good news that the public has more beach access,
Florida’s beaches have eroded even further due to sea level rise, storms and shoreline hardening structures, such as seawalls. Instead of being able to renourish beaches with new sand, Uchino and the FSBPA are finding it difficult to procure easements for the Army Corps of Engineers. The issue is a new Army Corps policy interpretation requiring 100 percent of private landowners to sign off on these projects. “Essentially, what that means
is if there’s a single holdout anywhere along a 2.5-mile area of beach [that is planned] to be nourished again, the Army Corps has now said the project will not go forward,” Uchino says. This is a change of legal interpretation from previous years, where a few holdouts could not stop a project from going forward.
Why would private landowners not want their beaches to be restored? Because by law, before any beach receives nourishment, the State of Florida sets a fixed Erosion Control Line (ECL) and everything seaward of that ECL is public. After the beach is restored, homeowners no longer have exclusivity over the new sand as their private property because the ECL
is fixed.
“Year after year, private property owners are going to lose their beaches to erosion if there is no restoration because that’s the only way to fight it,” Uchino says. “But because they want control of who sits in front of their houses, I know people who have said they would rather see their house fall into the ocean than sign over an easement.”
To Uchino, any law that benefits the public’s access to beaches or beach restoration is more than worthwhile. “Beaches have an amazing return on investment for state and local governments,” he says. “On top of that, it’s a deeply cultural tradition for Floridians to be able to go and be on a beach. This new law returns some measure of autonomy to them.”
So what’s next? Surely, skirmishes will continue along the coast as private beachfront homeowners balk and the public keeps the pressure on local officials to create better policies that ensure access to Florida’s sand. For now, enjoy those beaches you’ve always loved.
