Gov. Rick Perry said Friday he had not decided whether to veto a bill that contains a provision that exempts property owners on the Bolivar Peninsula from the Texas Open Beaches Act for four years. There’s not much to study. This is bad legislation, and it should be vetoed for two reasons.
First, it doesn’t pass the smell test. The bill to allow peninsula residents to rebuild properties — even though they might be on the public beach — was going nowhere.
But state Rep. Wayne Christian, a Republican from Center, kept pushing to get language from that bill into another piece of legislation that was likely to pass. In the final days of the Legislature’s session, he was able to get this loophole tacked onto another bill.
If the governor signs this legislation, Christian will be allowed to rebuild his vacation home in Crystal Beach. The house was valued at $187,300 before Hurricane Ike.
Many people complain about the kind of politics that prevail in Austin these days. Perry has a clear chance to do something about an outrageous example of self-interest.
The other reason this legislation deserves a quick veto is that it is bad public policy. The Open Beaches Act says that beaches belong to the public. If your land becomes a beach in Texas, you lose it, just as you would lose part of your cow pasture if a river changed course and ran through it. If a river runs through your pasture, you would not get to set up a tollbooth in the river and you would not get to charge bass boats and kayakers to pass.
The river would not be your private property in Texas — and neither would the beach.
Waterways and beaches are public property in Texas. And people who buy beach-front property are warned repeatedly, loudly and often about that provision in the law.
The Open Beaches Act is a good law. The alternative is to live in a state where most of the beaches are owned by the wealthy.
If that’s what the legislators and the governor want, they should have the courage to try to repeal the Open Beaches Act in its entirety. They shouldn’t pick the law to pieces by granting one exception after another.
This piece of legislation is bad public policy and smells like a kettle of fish. It begs for a veto.
