During the hearing Vinson delved, at times, into the overriding issues that Walton County has faced for years now with its beaches and ongoing battles over what white sand coastline can be construed as public or private property.
“This case boils down to the definition of what is the beach,” he said, asking an attorney for the Sheriff’s Office if, under the existing ordinance, sanctions could be levied for someone sitting in a chair in the sand outside their back door.
“You can’t have the sheriff saying you can’t go out into your back door, five or 10 feet from your back door,” Vinson said. “To anyone looking at the beach, sometimes you can’t tell where the beach really ends. Where does the beach end? That is the gray area I think we are really concerned with.”
In order to have won the emergency injunction, Safriet’s team was required to convince Judge Vinson that the property owners would have been likely to win at trial. He ruled Monday he did not believe that to be the case.
He also debunked the property owners’ argument that they would suffer irreparable harm if the injunction were not granted and that granting it serves the public good.
Vinson also expressed concern with the way the county’s amended ordinance is “construed and applied.”
He postulated an arbitrary distance of 10 yards from a permanent structure should be considered a safe space on a beach property from which the county emergency ordinance could not be applied.
“Public beach on the Gulf of Mexico is not defined by legal ownership, but by what is the beach,” Vinson said.
If you want to get a sense of what arguments are in play, here are the briefs of the parties (as well as one defendant's motion to dismiss, which is not yet scheduled for a hearing):