Get Off Your Land!

All they have to do is get a state lease, and they get one by asking. (“I don’t think we’ve ever denied a lease,” Brenda Culler-Gautschi, public information officer for the ODNR’s Office of Coastal Management, told me.) Leases give lakefront residents the legal right to kick the public off structures. For instance, if you want to keep walking on your beach, you may have to wade or swim around a dock in order to avoid trespassing. That’s the way it’s always been. No one’s complaining.

“We don’t like leases,” remarks Audubon Ohio’s Tinianow. “They confuse everything. Give them a permit, not a lease. That’s clear-cut. Leases get into the issues of property rights.”

What Tinianow dislikes most about leases is that they remind property-rights radicals that the land they like to imagine is theirs really isn’t. Marching under the banner of the Ohio Lakefront Group, they’ve filed suit against the ODNR in an effort to end public ownership up to the ordinary high-water mark or get compensation for what they allege is a “taking” of “their” beaches.

Intervening on the state’s behalf are the National Wildlife Federation along with its affiliate, the League of Ohio Sportsmen, and the Ohio Environmental Council (which includes Audubon Ohio). These groups are committed to preserving beach access for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that public support for fish and wildlife doesn’t happen without public encounters with fish and wildlife. An even greater concern is protecting wetlands, estuaries, naturally vegetated shorelines, and other fish and wildlife breeding, feeding, and nursery areas that the plaintiffs have designs on. Lake Erie now offers what the hook-and-bullet press consistently describes as the finest smallmouth bass and walleye fishing in the world. But walleyes spawn in cool, relatively unmolested tributaries; and smallmouth bass construct successful nests only in the shallows and only on natural gravel and sand substrates. What’s more, the fry of both species (and of most fish, for that matter) require “forests” of aquatic plants for cover. When developers hack up these habitats or replace them with, say, beach sand or other fill, these fish don’t just “go somewhere else.” They die out. The same holds for all birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians inhabiting or otherwise dependent on the alternately exposed and submerged lake bottom.

The Ohio Lakefront Group was cloned from a Michigan outfit called Save Our Shoreline—largely a front for the real estate industry but also including individual privatizers—which slipped a “beach-grooming” law through the Michigan legislature in 2003. The “grooming” was a euphemism for gouging out native vegetation with heavy machinery, the better to create white-sand beaches. In 2005 the National Wildlife Federation and its allies had to bring in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists to tell state legislators that while converting diverse wetland flora to sand might attract sunbathers, it wipes out the fish and wildlife that use it for food and shelter.

“This property-rights thing is absolutely contagious,” says Brian Preston, the National Wildlife Federation’s regional representative for Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Indiana. “After more than a year of habitat destruction, the Michigan legislature overwhelmingly undid the beach-grooming law. So the lakeshore residents in Ohio said: ‘Hell, if we own that submerged land, the state can’t say anything about grooming.’ Now we can bring in dump trucks and build ourselves nice little peninsulas and $3 million houses.’ Just follow the money. The money that started this whole thing came from the Ohio Home Builders Association and the Ohio Association of Realtors. The Lakefront Group took these sponsors off their website because it made them look ridiculous.” 

The greed feeds on itself, consuming all sense of reality. Some privatizers seriously claim they own not just to the low-water mark but halfway across the lake—to the international boundary. “I expect they’ll be wearing shirts that say ‘Anchors Off My Land,’ ” comments Jack Shaner, director of public affairs for the Ohio Environmental Council.

Despite their unique privileges to build structures to and in navigable water and despite the property-value windfalls society has showered on them by healing the lake, members of the Lakefront Group profess to be sorely tried. Testifying before the Ohio Senate in 2004, James O’Connor of Sheffield Lake declared: “I was extorted into signing a lease and with that action I relinquished my property rights. And I was subject to extreme regulations. Deceit, lies and intimidation will get you to sign almost anything. . . . I stand before you as a victim, a victim of the renegade ODNR Coastal Managers. A victim of an absurd policy that steals property. . . .”

In 2003 lakefront resident Cherry Pierce of Port Clinton laid the following sob story on the Ohio House: “I’ve already lost the sale on one property, and that property’s value has plummeted. I’ll soon lose another along with my house. Both are casualties of the policies of the current coastal management program.” But less than a month later she sold one of her properties for $2 million. It had just been appraised at $657,140.

Some of the plaintiffs in the suit against the ODNR have produced deeds suggesting they own to the low-water mark, but in every case the property line descriptions in their deeds had been changed by previous owners (usually between 1880 and about 1910) who replaced vague language such as “to the lake shore” with “the low-water mark.”