Items left on the beach overnight are a hazard to humans and sea turtles.

Tense battle over beach tents

By DINAH VOYLES PULVER and ANDREW GANT, Staff Writers
ORMOND BEACH -- After years of oceanfront living, Carol MacLeod watched in excitement early one morning as a female sea turtle dug a nest and deposited eggs right in front of her beachfront condominium.

MacLeod's delight turned to doubt when she saw the gauntlet the turtle had run to crawl up the beach. Crawl tracks in the sand showed the turtle had made a hard turn on the way up to avoid a tent pole among an array of poles left wedged in the sand overnight. It would face the same obstacles on the way back out to sea.

The experience prompted MacLeod to get in touch with her Volusia County councilman, Carl Persis, who brought the issue to the Volusia County Council at the end of a recent meeting.

Now the county has a crackdown in the works.

"In the past, we've put stickers on it, given them time to remove it," County Manager Jim Dinneen said. "That's not working for us."

MacLeod and others say the number of items left in the sand overnight seems to be growing, causing concern for both turtles and people -- the latter who walk and run the beach after sundown. The turtle MacLeod saw was an adept one. Some people aren't so lucky.

Dinneen, for example, nearly fell face-first in the sand one night when he jogged between two seemingly empty volleyball poles. (An unseen cord "got me right below the knee," he said.) Another night, when District 3 Councilwoman Joie Alexander was on the beach with her family, she watched as one of her grandchildren tripped over a piece of abandoned gear and fell in the dark.

All Volusia County does in cases like these, for now, is stick a tag on the offending item. As Dinneen pointed out, it isn't working.

But the tents, especially those people intend to return and pick up the next day, present a legal quandary for the county. The county does not have an ordinance that bans items from being left on the beach.

Beach Patrol Capt. Tammy Marris said patrolling officers don't drag off anyone's property because no ordinance allows them to do so. Instead, the tagging program takes place under an existing state law for abandoned property.

The tags don't threaten any consequences, simply stating: "Remove beach furniture at night for the safety of all beach users," followed by contact information for the county's beach services division.

Florence Bertolucci and her husband, who own a condo in the Shoreham in Ormond-By-The-Sea, watched Thursday evening as one group after another packed up and left their tent structures up along the beach. Even though it's a lot of work to lug all the stuff children need back and forth to the beach, Bertolucci said an ordinance to prohibit leave-behinds would be a good idea.

"I would definitely support that," she said.

A strict ordinance has been successful in Walton County, a tourist destination in the Panhandle that used to have a similar beach-clutter problem. The 2008 measure, county spokesman Ken Little said, "has worked out well and sort of mitigated" the issue.

In Walton, tent structures can stay up overnight if they're on the edge of the dune and "arranged in a compact configuration to avoid clutter." If the tent is too cumbersome to move back to the dunes, the owner can ask the county for a free permit to leave it out.

Otherwise, it can become county property. Officials there have broad power to deny permit requests, and the county reserves the right to take anything that stays on the beach longer than permitted.

Across much of South Walton, where there are more single-family homes on the beach than condos and hotels, Little said the people "have more space and luxury to haul a bunch of stuff down to the beach than out of a hotel room." But since the ordinance passed and the county posted warnings, he said, beachgoers have learned.

"There have been no complaints about it lately," Little said. And "we're having a banner year this year. The place is just slammed full."

People often assume that a federal permit the county holds, which allows beach driving while managing for sea turtles, requires the county to pick up or move stray items on the beach that could interfere with turtle nesting, but that isn't the case, county officials said. It does prohibit items from being left inside the marked conservation zones, set aside along the beach for sea turtle nests.

The federal permit also requires the county to remove obstacles when the eggs in a nest are due to hatch, said Jennifer Winters, who manages the county's sea turtle habitat conservation plan..

County volunteers on early morning turtle patrols keep track of those due dates, and on those nights, a contractor rakes over ruts and removes any obstacles across a 30-foot path between nest and ocean, Winters said. Those same volunteers also tag items they see left on the beach.

That, Winters said, is all the county is legally allowed to do.

County officials are considering their options. It's unclear if they will draft a specific ordinance or explore some other option. For safety reasons, Dinneen recently decided to pull the Beach Patrol's fleet of pickups off patrols -- opting for smaller ATVs in the future -- and it's unclear if the ATVs will be capable of hauling much abandoned gear.

The pickups could still go out on early-morning tent patrols, County Council members suggested at their last meeting.

Deputy County Attorney Jamie Seaman said any ordinance must be structured to stay within the scope of the county's authority -- public safety -- without violating private property rights. For example, no single boundary establishes private property ownership along the beach, and boundaries vary widely. In some cases, lots are owned all the way to the mean high water mark, Seaman said.

Dinneen suggested the county could print warnings on the next round of brochures, provide signs for hotels to post on their properties, and then start hauling off the clutter.

Alexander suggested donating the spoils to local booster clubs or Pop Warner teams -- groups that will put them to good use.

Persis said he hated to add another task to the list of jobs for county staffers, but the problem has become a safety issue in many areas, especially in his district.

"We've had cases where those poles come loose, winds pick them up, and then you have a flying missile through the air," he said. "That's not the way you want to enjoy the beach, with things being hurled at you."