Fight over access to Great Lakes shoreline playing out in courts

The San Louis Obispo Tribune (and others) has this update on the court case regarding owners rights and beach access. Two points that I draw from this article are that beach front owners are at risk of loosing property rights from waters edge up to the high water mark and that public access means access via motor vehicles as well as walking.

The Michigan dispute started four years ago in Alcona County, 200 miles north of Detroit. [Joan] Glass trimmed bushes in her easement along the Lake Huron shore. Neighbors Richard and Kathleen Goeckel objected to the bush trimming and told Glass she was no longer welcome to walk the beach in front of their home. Glass sued, had her beachcombing rights restored by a local court, but lost those rights again with the appeals court ruling.

The Michigan case and another in Ohio have grown into a fight over public access to hundreds of miles of picturesque Great Lakes shoreline. "People are all of a sudden moving here and saying, `This is mine! This is mine!'" Glass said. "The whole thing is ridiculous."

Jean Hauflaire, a 77-year-old Chicago native who owns a home along Lake Michigan in New Buffalo, Mich., supports the ruling. Too often, she said, spillover visitors from a neighboring public beach have spoiled the view. "This is our back yard," Hauflaire said. "Would you want people sitting and drinking in your back yard?"

Environmentalists "make it out like we want to put fences up to the water's edge - and that's not the intent at all," said Ernie Krygier, president of Save Our Shoreline, a property rights group boasting some 2,000 members throughout the Great Lakes basin. "It's all about principle," said Krygier, who lives on Lake Huron's Saginaw Bay. "If there are 100 homes on the water, you might have one goofy enough to want to keep people off the beach."

In Ohio, Lake Erie cottage owners are suing the state Department of Natural Resources to end public ownership claims up to the high-water mark, or gain compensation for the state "taking" of beaches.

So far, the debate has not resulted in an uptick of trespassing cases, authorities said. But after the latest ruling, one beachcombing supporter received a ticket for driving his truck on the beach in front of private homes near the scene of the Glass vs. Goeckel dispute, said Glass' attorney, Pamela Burt.