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The path heading from Old Ocean back to Fayette Drive. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Neighbors claim private right to walkway at end of street; people west of A1A have used it for 40 years, others say

Related: Ocean Ridge: For irate owner wrongly forced to trim hedges, apology doesn’t cut it

By John Pacenti

Nothing turns neighbor against neighbor in Ocean Ridge like beach access. It’s Florida’s modern take on the Hatfields and McCoys.

Recently, Turtle Beach condo owners battled Tropical Drive residents with slurs on social media and the tearing down of signs. There was even an arrest for criminal mischief.

Now, it’s the dispute over a 100-yard elbow-shaped path at the end of Fayette Drive that abuts the Colonial Ridge condominium complex and ends at Old Ocean Boulevard. It’s residents of Fayette Drive versus the residents across State Road A1A at Crown Colony and the Ocean Ridge Yacht Club.

“We just want peace. We want to be left alone. We want to keep our walk private,” said Fayette resident Sarah Steies, whose house is at the end of the road and adjacent to the path.

She said three lawyers hired by the town and two attorneys in private practice have found the bypass is exclusive to Fayette Drive homeowners. Residents Steies, Melanie Rodriguez and Elizabeth Hamilton have been the voice for the neighborhood in the dispute.

Britt Flanagan, a former board member for the Yacht Club, said the women have made the path an issue only recently.

“There is something else called pre-existing use and since the Yacht Club opened in 1987 residents of that Yacht Club have used that path,” she said. “The history of the path is that for all these years everyone has co-existed amicably.”

The Yacht Club and Crown Colony reached out to Town Commissioner Carolyn Cassidy for help in April, complaining about the installation of a gate on the walkway ­— even though no such gate existed. There is a new gate with a lock to Fayette Drive’s deck; that lock was recently vandalized with glue.

Cassidy said these disputes are unseemly for Ocean Ridge but acknowledged they are commonplace in coastal Florida when it comes to beach rights. “We went through this with Tropical Drive and Turtle Beach,” she said. “There’s this infighting with residents. It’s neighbor against neighbor.”

Vice Mayor Steve Coz sides with the residents of the Yacht Club and Crown Colony. “They have 40 years of customary use, right? And any judge on the planet will grant them that permission and that access,” he said.

Controversial crosswalk
When it comes to this grassy path known as “the Walk,” Ocean Ridge politics reigns supreme.

Fayette residents said commissioners ignored their concerns when approving a crosswalk installed in 2021 just south of the street’s entrance on A1A that they say funnels vehicular, e-bike and even more foot traffic onto their dead-end street.

“Our cars have been hit six times,” said Steies, who has watched vehicles get caught like flies in honey trying to maneuver back onto A1A.

Steies and Rodriguez said commissioners are supporting their friends at Crown Colony and the Yacht Club in taking the side that the walk is open to the public. Rodriguez said the commission has ignored Fayette residents’ concerns about safety issues since 2018.

But on a commission where elections are won by a few hundred votes, the condos are an important electoral bloc, said former Commissioner Terry Brown. “Crown Colony has a lot of votes. If they support you they can basically call an election,” he said.

Brown said the commission inappropriately used taxpayer dollars to pay for the crosswalk to cater to Crown Colony and the Yacht Club, directing people to private property.

“They were told by their lawyers and other people that they hired that the walk was private and not open to the public and they did it anyway,” he said.

Steies said the two condo communities also provide something else to commissioners that 14 homes on one road cannot — business opportunities. She noted that Cassidy is a real estate agent, as is Coz’s wife.

“They don’t make money as commissioners. They become commissioners so that they can further their private businesses,” she said.

Reams of documents
Steies and Rodriguez sit at the kitchen table in Steies’ home. Steies’ mother had this home built in 1968 when Crown Colony was just converting from a co-op and the Yacht Club was some nice Intracoastal Waterway property.

Fanned out around them are reams of documents stretching back years, showing legally the walk is private. Steies holds uncashed checks in nominal amounts from Yacht Club residents like she is playing the card game Go Fish, saying the condo community aimed to claim ownership of the deck by contributing to recent maintenance.

Flanagan said when interviewed she thought her condo complex had contributed to recent renovations.

Recently, the three Fayette residents hired renowned land-use attorney Alan Ciklin, who reached back to 1972 in finding a dedication on the plat for the neighborhood that makes the path exclusive for Fayette Drive residents.

Following the path across Old Ocean Boulevard, there are two decks, one dedicated to homeowners on Fayette, the other leased to residents of Crown Colony.

“The ‘Walk’ is not necessary for Crown Colony to access its leased property. Crown Colony can access the leased property via other means,” Ciklin wrote on Sept. 10 to an attorney representing the condominium complex.

Beachway Drive, a couple of blocks north of Fayette and directly across from Woolbright Road, is the public access point. Steies noted Coz lives on Beachway and “is very happy to divert traffic to us and that is probably why he pushed for the crosswalk when he was mayor.”

A couple who used the Crown Colony gate and declined to be identified bicycle down the path on their way to visit the ocean. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Renewed feud
The issue over the pathway had been simmering since at least 2017 when an attorney hired by the town found, like Ciklin, the path was dedicated to Fayette residents. The issue started to get heated in 2019 when the crosswalk was proposed.

It was this April when Flanagan and Ron Kirn, president of Crown Colony, filed a complaint, sending it to Cassidy, Town Manager Lynne Ladner and Zoning Official Manny Palacios. They said Fayette residents violated the commission’s decision in July 2021 by installing the phantom gate on the pathway, installing another gate on its deck without a permit, and placing signs that say “private walk.”

Kirn could not be reached for comment.

Steies and Rodriguez said Fayette Drive residents didn’t have a problem for decades with residents of Crown Colony using the walkway — it was the neighborly thing to do. Then, Kirn made an allegiance with the Yacht Club, “who decided that they wanted to start sitting on our deck and walking down our walk, too, and we were like, ‘No — you picked the Intracoastal,’” Steies said.

The issue really boiled over at the Aug. 5 commission meeting.

“There are two individuals in neighboring communities who have shared untrue stories about people in my neighborhood,” Rodriguez told commissioners. “The stories are slanderous, attack our character and simply not true.”

Rodriguez said, for instance, she has never chased anyone off the beach.

Rodriguez said commissioners have repeated these untrue stories regarding “Fayette’s private walk and private access without doing their due diligence to find out the facts.”

Cassidy approached Steies and Rodriguez after the meeting, but there was no detente.

Cassidy told The Coastal Star that she was trying to respond to constituents’ needs by making access to the walkway a priority.

“I seem to be a bit of a scapegoat on this for them,” Cassidy said. “I just think it’s unfortunate. They’ve all retained attorneys at this point — the Yacht Club, Crown Colony and the Fayette Drive community. The attorneys are communicating, and I’ve been advised by our attorney to just stay out of it.”

Coz said that he has been told by town officials that the residents on Fayette Drive could pull a permit to gate the path for real this time. He has also been told the residents of Crown Colony could pull a permit to remove the gate.

“They could do this all year long — just go back and forth,” he said.

This sign identifies the dune crossover and deck on the beach reserved for Fayette Drive residents. John Pacenti/The Coastal Star