Casting clouds on beach access | Another view

The News-Journal Editorial Board, Daytona Beach, Fla.
Beachgoers enjoy Bathtub Beach in Stuart on May 15, 2017, on its first day open following the completion of a beach renourishment project.

A new state law, apparently intended to settle a series of spats between wealthy beachfront property owners in a few Panhandle counties, is causing shock waves across the state — for good reason.

The law is a hot mess, and there's way too much confusion over what its long-term impact will be. That's a huge problem in a state whose tourism-economy lifeblood (outside of the theme-park zone) depends largely on access to hundreds of miles of beaches.

Florida beaches are clearly public — by law and custom — up to what's known as the "mean high water mark," aka the "wet sand." But those areas are often unaccessible if beachgoers can't use dry-sand, adjacent areas to access the shoreline and park their belongings.

By tradition, those sections of beach, on the seaward side of the dune line, have been open to the public to walk and (in a few areas, including Volusia County) drive on. The new law could open the door for adjacent property owners to claim dominion over that sand, throwing up barriers that keep beachgoers from spreading their towels in front of their condominiums or homes.

It flowered from a long-running dispute in Walton County, where owners of condos and multi-million-dollar mansions started fencing off sections of "their" beach.

Beach-access advocates say the law, which was passed in the dying days of the 2018 legislative session and signed by Gov. Rick Scott, could make it tougher to access as much as 60 percent of shoreline across Florida.

"This will forever change the character of Florida beaches," says Flagler County Attorney Al Hadeed, who is working on an ordinance intended to keep his county's beaches accessible to the public.

Holly Parker of the Surfrider Foundation, which fought the legislation two years in a row, agrees with that assessment — and goes further, saying an ordinance might not be enough to protect access. She believes counties across the state might be faced with the prospect of fending off hundreds, perhaps thousands, of court challenges intended to strip Floridians' customary access to the beach.

Or not: The Florida Association of Counties, which originally had problems with the legislation, isn't really alarmed by the final version, says Director of External Affairs Cragin Mosteller.

MORE: Public access to private beaches to be affected by new Florida law

These are all people who know what they're talking about. But they can't agree on what the new law might do. That kind of ambiguity is bad news in a state whose economy depends on beach access — especially given Florida's legal history of beachfront property owners seizing on the tiniest cracks in the law in their attempts to close off access and create "private" beaches.

Fortunately, there's broad agreement on one point: Volusia County, which adopted a comprehensive beach-access ordinance years ago, is safe. So is St. Johns County. Any stretch of beach adjacent to publicly owned land is also open to public access in perpetuity. But overall, Florida's beach-access rules just got a lot more nebulous. And that uncertainty is a bad and shameful thing.

This is what a real threat to beach access looks like: lines of legislative fine print that courts will have to untangle — hopefully, but not certainly, to protect the rights of Floridians to access beaches that, by ancient custom, have always belonged to them.