SAND KEY, Florida — The Army Corps of Engineers in 2018 offered what some call a devil’s bargain to 461 property owners on this Gulf Coast barrier island.
All could sign “perpetual easement” contracts giving the Army Corps permission to pump taxpayer-subsidized sand onto their oceanfront beaches but effectively expanding the public beach onto their private property.
Or they could refuse and face a future with no federal assistance to rebuild any beaches — public or private — along one of Florida’s fastest-eroding shorelines.
More than half of Sand Key’s property owners refused to sign at the time, hoping the Army Corps would pocket its easement requirement and continue pumping sand under a longstanding federally authorized “beach nourishment” project.
It wasn’t an outlandish idea. The corps had rebuilt Sand Key’s beaches without full easements five times before since 1988, including a $36.5 million project in 2018 with a 75 percent federal cost share.
Yet seven years and three major hurricanes after issuing its easement edict, the corps hasn’t budged, even as the beaches have been reduced to tidal flats, a process accelerated by Hurricane Idalia in 2023 and finished by Helene and Milton last fall.
Nor have almost one-third of the Sand Key property owners who say the perpetual easements were foisted upon them without due process, even though the policy isn’t new and has been enforced in other communities receiving sand under what’s known as the Coastal Storm Risk Management (CSRM) Program.
“We have a right to keep people off our property,” said Diana Fuller, who owns a 5,000-square-foot beachfront home in Indian Shores, one in a string of small municipalities lining Florida State Road 699 between Clearwater Beach and Treasure Island. “There’s no reason a public beach needs to be built up to our seawall, and until someone can explain that to me, I’m not playing.”
But as the political sands shift in Washington, questions are emerging about how the second Trump administration will view beach nourishment in Florida and other coastal states where continuously replenishing sand has morphed into a never-ending, multibillion-dollar civil works enterprise. Meanwhile, taxpayer costs are soaring, while the program’s benefits become more ephemeral amid rising seas and intensifying coastal storms.
“It’s hard to predict anything about this administration, but removing the easements requirement would throw the whole [CSRM] program into pandemonium,” said Howard Marlowe, a nationally recognized consultant to communities navigating Army Corps regulations around shoreline protection.
Pinellas County officials, with the support of their federal delegation, argue it cannot wait any longer. Sand needs to flow immediately to rebuild the beaches before the 2025 hurricane season arrives in June.
Some argue the corps has become more of an obstacle than a partner, even as it has given some leeway to Pinellas County to initiate an emergency rebuild. The agency late last year agreed to reduce its easement requirement to 50 years, for example, and this spring it granted a permit for a county-led emergency reconstruction project with locally obtained easements. The compromise agreements do not include language about public access to private beaches.
But even that hasn’t worked. As of April 28, 142 Sand Key residents and vacation rental owners still have not signed the paperwork, according to an online database maintained by Pinellas County. For local leaders, the impasse has gone from a headache to a migraine, triggering another round of Washington lobbying with hopes President Donald Trump will force the corps to bypass the regulation and begin pumping sand.
In March, a delegation led by Pinellas County Commissioner Kathleen Peters traveled to Washington to implore Trump administration officials, including acting Army Corps Principal Secretary Stacey Brown, to cut the red tape. Peters later described the meetings as “incredibly productive,” adding, “the necessity of beach nourishment for Pinellas is clear to all.”
The county is backed by Florida Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, both Republican allies of the president. Luna, whose district includes Pinellas County’s oceanfront communities, has sought to position herself as a stalwart supporter of Trump, including introducing legislation that would add the president’s likeness to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.
In a March 5 letter to the president, Luna said residents experienced more severe impacts from recent hurricanes because the Army Corps had “thrown up bureaucratic roadblock after roadblock to prevent timely construction” of a planned 2023 renourishment.
“I believe that if the Pinellas County project had been constructed on schedule … the county could have mitigated the loss of life and property from these storm events,” she added.
Neither the White House nor Luna’s office responded to requests for comment.
Michelle Roberts, a spokesperson for the Army Corps’ Jacksonville District office, which oversees Florida federal beach renourishment projects, said the district has received no directive from Washington to lift or exempt the easement requirement for Pinellas County.
“We can’t do the work without the proper easements for access to conduct the project,” Roberts said in an email.
Eugene Pawlik, an agency spokesperson in Washington, said the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army Civil Works has ordered an updated cost assessment for the project, adding that officials “appreciate Pinellas County’s continued engagement and look forward to working with them to find a path forward consistent with congressional direction.”
Property rights vs. public benefit
While Pinellas County has become ground zero in the fight over federal easements, the thorny questions about balancing private property rights against public beach access go well beyond what’s popularly known as the “Suncoast,” which received its first federally subsidized sand in 1969 on Treasure Island, just south of Sand Key.
The principle behind the corps’ perpetual easement requirement is that placing any taxpayer-subsidized sand on an eroded beach affords the public access to that sand, even if it extends onto private property.
Under Florida law, that boundary is established by what’s called the “erosion control line,” which roughly adheres to the mean high-tide line along a particular stretch of coast. That means the public can access a portion of many beaches, including those in front of private homes.
While some property owners view the easements as a necessary trade-off to maintain wide, tourist-friendly beaches, others see a government assault on what are known as “littoral rights” secured under state law and allowing property owners to keep trespassers out.
Fuller has not — nor will she — sign any easement impinging on those rights, she said in an interview last November at her home overlooking the blue-green Gulf of Mexico, which Trump renamed the Gulf of America in January. In a followup call last month, Fuller doubled down. “I don’t believe a word they say,” she said. “It’s land extortion as far as I’m concerned.”
More than 50 of her neighbors have also refused to relent, striking a blow against local officials who say without beach renourishment what remains of Sand Key will wash into the ocean and take with it multimillion-dollar homes and a multibillion-dollar tourism economy.
“Life as we know it — the salt life, as I call it — is in jeopardy,” Peters, the county commissioner, told residents at a February public meeting. “And if we don’t take care of it, we’re going to lose it.”
It’s a clarion call some easement fence-sitters have begun heeding as they weigh their property rights convictions against a disappearing shoreline.
The county’s proposal is to bypass the Army Corps’ requirements by agreeing to pay for the $130 million in renourishment with revenues from local tourist development taxes.
More than 80 Sand Key property owners have signed the county easements since January, according to a Pinellas database, upping the number of federal or local easements to 318 properties, or roughly 69 percent of all owners. The remaining 31 percent were holding firm.
Fuller — who continues to lead the opposition in Indian Shores — predicted neither the county nor federal government would succeed in getting people to agree to their conditions. “There’s no way they get all of these owners to sign,” she said. “At least not in my lifetime.”
In fact, Indian Shores remains among the most dug-in communities on the easements, where 55 of the town’s 159 property owners have refused to sign, according to the latest county figures.
Widespread resistance extends to two neighboring communities — Indian Rocks Beach and Redington Shores — where a combined 91 of 255 property owners had not signed either federal or local easements as of April 18.
‘Catastrophic’ erosion
John Hall, whose three-story home is perched above a recently exposed seawall in Redington Shores, said he supports shorter-duration, limited-access easements if it allows sand to start flowing.
“The whole beach thing is you need 100 percent [compliance] for the corps to say yes, yet anything we’ve ever done governmentally that I can remember where you had 100 percent agreement is very little,” Hall said in an interview in his driveway just weeks after Milton.
“I’d say 99.9 percent of the time the public loves this beach and there has been no impact on us whatsoever,” he added. “I don’t want somebody out there selling hot dogs. But to watch a 2-year-old kid out there playing in the sand and chasing the seagulls, that’s a joy for us.”
A visit by a POLITICO’s E&E News reporter last November revealed the extent of the damage.
Where soft white sand as deep as 5 feet once rose from the water’s edge, only flats of speckled gray sand remained, some gullied from tidal inundation. Brackish water had collected under concrete seawalls where sand had been scoured away. Vegetated dunes meant to protect shoreline homes and buffer the beach from pool decks and parking lots were battered or simply gone, their walkovers roped off for safety.
In an interview at Indian Rocks Beach, Pinellas County Public Works Director Kelli Hammer Levy acknowledged she and other local officials are caught between what have become two immovable objects — the Army Corps and property owners like Fuller and her neighbors.
“To not be able to come together, it’s incredibly frustrating,” she said.
Millan Mora, who oversees all federal beach reconstruction in Florida for the Army Corps’ Jacksonville District, said the agency would initiate its planned project if the easement dispute can be resolved, noting Sand Key’s beaches had receded dangerously landward and now resembled their pre-nourishment condition during the 1980s. “I would call it catastrophic,” he said of conditions after last year’s storms.
Mora said there is no ambiguity around the federal easement requirement but acknowledged the corps has allowed exceptions in the past. In 2018, for example, officials allowed a Sand Key renourishment project to go forward without all of the required easements.
The result was a “patchwork fix” that did not meet engineering standards for a federally funded beach reconstruction, officials said, and prompted corps leaders to make clear there would be no future nourishments without full easement compliance.
No legal recourse
Legal experts say the government has standing under the “public trust doctrine” to require the easements in exchange for shoreline stabilization projects, including beach nourishment.
Erin Ryan, a professor and associate dean for environmental programs at the Florida State University College of Law and expert in public lands law, said she understands why Sand Key property owners are resistant.
“It’s a difficult problem because people feel so strongly about their property rights,” Ryan said. “But the hard truth is that the property rights these owners care about are not as static as they would prefer. Coastal property is always changing due to dynamic natural processes like beach erosion, accretion and avulsion.”
“But as sea levels and weather patterns change, coastlines change too, and these factors are just playing out in a way that’s very distressing for some people,” Ryan said.
Marlowe, the shoreline protection consultant and president of the Washington-based Warwick Group, said the corps should consider dropping perpetual easements in favor of shorter-duration ones like the 50-year option recently offered in Pinellas County.
Until that happens, however, conflicts over who gets their beaches repaired, and at whose cost, will continue — in perpetuity.
“I’m sorry, if there are homeowners who don’t want it, it screws the pooch,” Marlowe said. “Either you agree that you want that benefit or no one gets the benefit.”
