drift, perspectives in surfing

What a great time to be a Texan!  This past Tuesday we went to the polls and laid claim to our beaches by passing Constitutional Proposition 9. The legislation protects the right of the public, individually and collectively, to access and use beaches bordering the seaward shore of the Gulf of Mexico.  Not only did the voters just pass Prop 9, they assigned it “mandate status” with a margin of 3 to 1.  In my opinion, this is the biggest single piece of coastal legislation since the ratification of the Texas Open Beaches Act (TOBA) in 1959.
Texas is unique in that it does not have any beaches that are privately owned to the waterline.  TOBA established a “rolling easement,” essentially a state park that stretches between the low water line and the vegetation line. By order of the TOBA, coastal municipalities and counties must provide access to beaches at least every half mile and provide fifteen parking spaces for every linear foot of beach.
May, 2009 was a dark time for TOBA.  In the wake of Hurricane Ike, which devastated Surfside, Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula, political chaos ensued.  In the last minutes of the 2009 legislative session, Representative Wayne Christian, who lost his second home to the Gulf of Mexico and wanted to rebuild, slipped an amendment into an unrelated bill, exempting his area of coast from TOBA.  To compound the problem, Governor Rick “Good Hair” Perry refused to take a stand at all and let the bill move quietly into law.  He even managed to avoid signing it so that he wouldn’t look bad in our upcoming gubernatorial election.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the Texas Chapters of the Surfrider Foundation made it their mission to get Prop 9 passed.  On November 3, that goal came to fruition.  Public beaches access has been enshrined in the Texas Constitution by those whom it protects: the voters.  No single legislator can screw us out of our beaches!  God Bless Texas Voters!