If you caught the NPR piece that ran the first week of September, you already know Santa Rosa Beach got called "ground zero" in Florida's beach access fight. The photo ran at Ed Walline Regional Beach Access, the boardwalk crossing at the corner of Scenic 393 and 30A, just across the street from Gulf Place. What the story didn't spell out plainly is this: fourteen months after Tallahassee handed Walton County the legal power to reopen its own sand, the county commission still hasn't used it.
That's the detail worth sitting with if you live here and just want to know where you can put a chair down this weekend. The law changed. The sand didn't.
How One County Ended Up Suing Its Own Beaches
The short version starts in October 2016, when the Walton County Commission passed an ordinance declaring the public's customary right to use dry sand across the county's beaches, the strip between the water and the dune line that in Florida can be privately owned even though the wet sand below it never is. Two years later, the Florida Legislature passed a law requiring any local government that wanted to recognize that kind of customary use to prove it in court, parcel by parcel, unless the ordinance predated January 2016. Walton County's ordinance missed that cutoff by nine months. It became the only county in the state forced to litigate its own beach rules from scratch.
The scope of what the county had to prove is the real story: roughly 1,194 individual Gulf-front parcels, each needing its own showing of longstanding public use. Facing that math, the county settled with a large share of the owners rather than try more than a thousand mini-trials. A group of about 80 landowners, represented by Tallahassee attorney Kent Safriet, fought instead and won in court, arguing that customary use is an English legal doctrine that doesn't square with the Fifth Amendment's protection against uncompensated taking of private property. Some of those owners have since gone further, pursuing quiet-title claims to establish clear ownership of the sand behind their homes.
The 2023 settlement is what most residents actually deal with day to day. It created what the county now calls the Transitory Zone: a strip up to 20 feet landward of the wet-and-dry sand line on the specific private beaches covered by the agreement, where the public can walk, jog, swim, and sunbathe under a defined set of rules. That zone, not anything decided this year, is still the operating rulebook on a meaningful stretch of Santa Rosa Beach's shoreline.
The Repeal That Changed the Law, Not the Sand
Last year, under public pressure over the confrontations the 2018 law had produced between beachgoers and private security, the Legislature repealed it through Senate Bill 1622. The repeal restored Walton County's original authority: a local government can again declare customary use and pass an ordinance, and it's the property owner's burden to sue if they disagree, the reverse of what the 2018 law required.
In the fourteen months since, the commission still hasn't passed one. What it has passed, on May 26, 2026, is a resolution affirming general support for public beach use, one that specifically thanked a private landowner, Dune Allen, Inc., for voluntarily sharing its beach with non-owners. A resolution records a position. An ordinance creates a legal line on a map that a property owner has to go to court to challenge. Walton County chose the first.
"On Day 1, nothing changes."
That's how Acting County Attorney Clay Adkinson described the practical effect of the repeal when it was signed, and he was right. The repeal reset the legal starting point for a future fight. It didn't redraw a single boundary on the ground. Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson Jr. has described the result as ambiguity his deputies now have to police in real time, caught between beachgoers who consider the sand public and owners who consider a chair on their dry sand trespassing.
What a New Ordinance Still Couldn't Undo
Even if the commission passes an ordinance tomorrow, three things from the last decade would stay exactly as they are. Parcels already covered by the 2023 settlement remain covered by that settlement, since a new ordinance doesn't reopen a signed agreement. Quiet-title judgments already entered in court stay entered, since a later statute doesn't erase a prior ruling. And the physical infrastructure of the dispute, the private security, the posted signs, the roped-off lines that residents have navigated for years, doesn't disappear because Tallahassee changed a statute.
That's the part a headline about a "repealed law" tends to flatten. The repeal changes who has to sue whom going forward. It does not touch the map that already exists.
What This Actually Looks Like at Ed Walline
Ed Walline Regional Beach Access is one of nine Regional Beach Accesses Walton County Tourism maintains countywide, out of 58 public beach access points in total, and it's unambiguously public: parking, restrooms, an ADA-accessible boardwalk, two picnic shelters, and a two-story viewing platform. Nothing about the settlement or the resolution changes how that specific access functions. What changes is what happens once you're standing on the sand and walking beyond the public stretch onto a beach the county's map codes as tan, meaning owner-managed private beach under the 2023 settlement.
Here's what actually governs that tan-coded sand right now:
| Rule | What it means on the ground |
|---|---|
| Transitory Zone width | Up to 20 feet landward of the wet and dry sand line |
| Sunbathing hours | 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. only, with personal chairs or towels |
| Capacity limit | One beachgoer per five feet of private beach frontage |
| Access point | You cannot enter the Transitory Zone through the owner-managed site itself; use a public access point instead |
| Owner authority | Private owners and their guests can ask non-compliant beachgoers to relocate or leave |
The practical version: walking, running, and swimming are allowed through that 20-foot strip at any hour, but setting up a chair for the afternoon is a narrower window, and it only exists at all because of a 2023 court settlement, not because of anything the county did this year.
Reading the Map Before You Walk Out
Walton County's interactive beach access map color-codes every stretch of shoreline: green and blue for beaches that are unambiguously public, tan for owner-managed private beach under the settlement, and areas the county has flagged separately where a judicial finding of customary use exists but where enforcement still depends on the county posting clear signage. Earlier this year, one local land-use attorney tracking these cases counted roughly 95 parcels in that last category, places where the public has a legal right to be but where the burden is on the county to mark it, and where the signage hasn't always kept pace with the ruling.
That gap between what a court decided and what a sign on the beach actually tells you is the single most useful thing to understand if you live in Santa Rosa Beach and walk this stretch regularly. The map is the tool. The sign in front of you is the authority. When they disagree, the sign wins your afternoon, even if a courtroom would eventually side with you.
The Practical Read for This Season
None of this is likely to resolve soon. Advocates on both sides are now looking past the county entirely, toward a statewide constitutional amendment that would settle the underlying property-rights question for good, since Walton isn't the only Florida county where this fight has started to surface. Until that happens, or until the commission actually passes an ordinance instead of a resolution, the rules that matter for a Saturday at Ed Walline or anywhere along this stretch of 30A are the ones the 2023 settlement already wrote: the 20-foot zone, the 9-to-4 window, the five-foot-per-person math, and the signs the county has or hasn't yet posted on the parcels courts have already ruled on.
The story that ran this month was about a law changing. The one that actually affects your weekend is about a law that didn't.
Beach access is one of the questions we get asked most by both longtime residents and people considering a move to this stretch of 30A, and it's exactly the kind of local detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet. If you're weighing what a property's proximity to public versus private beach actually means for how you'll use it, or thinking through a sale where beach access has become part of every buyer conversation, Andre Dominick & Theresa Felton can walk through what we're seeing on the ground. Let's Talk.
