Picture this: A sandy, 25-mile stretch of beach, just a three-hour drive from Miami but devoid of grocery stores or gas stations, restaurants, bars or hotels. Instead, sea turtles nest on the beach, their hatchlings’ sense of orientation protected by dark-sky rules and by long-term residents who know to handle them with care on their extensive strolls along a quiet, windswept beach.
Welcome to Brevard County’s southern barrier island, one of the least developed areas on Florida’s Atlantic coast.
It’s a quaint, still pristine paradise to the few thousand people who settled in mostly bungalow-style homes, many of them escapees from Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale and other places they say were over-developed. And it all seemed at risk just a few years ago.
In October 2022, Brevard’s commissioners voted to upzone a rural lot to four homes per acre. On paper, it seemed a benign decision, but residents who attended reacted with cries of “Oh my God” that rippled through the room. To them, it was as if the commission had just handed down a death sentence to their rural community.
READ MORE: Living on the edge: Paradise in peril
In a state where developers usually hold the upper hand, they feared what would follow: Soon, their low-slung, single-story homes would be overshadowed by condos and mega-hotels, their windswept beaches packed with tourists, the dark sky fractured by lights that would disorient nesting sea turtles.
But something extraordinary happened instead. That meeting became a turning point.
If residents rolled over on the county’s decision, “we’d be like Miami Beach,” said Mark Shantzis, a longtime resident and a Miami transplant. “Or we could fight back.”
Eventually, a little grassroots group called BIPPA, the Barrier Islands Preservation and Protection Association, would secure one of the strongest protections placed on a Florida barrier island in four decades, ensuring that, unlike elsewhere across the state, construction and population growth is limited in an area increasingly at risk from worsening storms, erosion and rising seas.
“It was up to us to make sure nothing gets passed that destroys our barrier island,” said Beth Glover, a licensed real estate agent and current president of BIPPA — though at the beginning nobody had a clue just how successful they’d be.
Their victory, they say, is a roadmap to creating a bipartisan grassroots movement: Only by banding together venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs, scientists and surfers, grandmothers and families with special-needs children — people from different backgrounds and politics — were they able to succeed.
Barrier islands across Florida have seen a population boom in the last few decades. Some 765,000 people now live on barrier islands – shifting banks of sand that are among the state’s most fragile, ephemeral ecosystems.
And Brevard’s barrier islands are currently being developed faster than anywhere else in the state — increasing the population and property value.
In an analysis of development and population growth of Florida’s barrier islands, the Miami Herald found that Miami-Dade and Brevard counties have the largest populations, with each now around 125,000. The key difference: On Miami-Dade’s barrier islands, the number of residents has gone down since 2017, while Brevard’s continues to rise.
Near Cocoa Beach, just to the north in the central part of the county, hotels with hundreds of rooms and luxurious vacation rentals are already crowding the oceanfront – the type of development residents in the south end saw creeping into their area, too. The latest, Harbor Island Beach, a cookie-cutter development of vacation rentals, was described by many as “miserable” and an “eyesore” – and a herald of what might be to come, said Glover.
Shortly after the October 2022 commission meeting, a core team of BIPPA gathered in their single-room, blue-painted headquarters, just a few feet from the shifting, untamed dunes, to figure out their next move.
To stop developers, they’d need an ally more powerful than their commissioners, and the January 2023 meeting with the area’s state legislative delegation, they figured, could present one.
Thankfully, Glover said, BIPPA had built a network of supporters who could mobilize “at the snap of our fingers.” Hundreds of them packed the room when they laid out why even a small upzoning change was a risk they couldn’t take.
Hurricane evacuation risk quickly became one of the strongest arguments. With only two bridges that were 25 miles apart, more residents meant slower escapes during storms. Already, the two-lane A1A was strained. The Indian River Lagoon, wedged between the urban mainland and the island, could not absorb more pollution, and new septic systems could jeopardize hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded cleanup efforts.
Then there were the sea turtles — which became the heart of the fight. The island is one of the world’s prime loggerhead nesting sites and home to a growing population of greens. Tens of thousands of hatchlings emerge each year, guided by the moon toward the sea, returning decades later to lay their own nests.
Stacy Gallagher, development and policy coordinator for the Sea Turtle Conservancy, had traveled from Gainesville to make that case, and remembers feeling heartened when boisterous applause punctuated each of her points.
“It was overwhelming,” she said of the community’s support to limit development.
The entire delegation was won over. What to do about the looming development, however, was less obvious.
'We need development that works with the environment’
Eventually, the idea of creating an Area of Critical State Concern was floated, a designation reserved for stretches of land so significant to the state that they must be protected “from uncontrolled development that would cause substantial deterioration,” according to Florida Commerce, which reviews all development projects in such areas.
Future plans to develop the barrier island would have to account for its ecological, social and safety impact, but getting the designation felt like a long shot. So far, only four such areas exist across the state – in the Florida Keys, Big Cypress, the Green Swamp and Apalachicola Bay – and the last one was granted some forty years ago.
One of the most familiar with the process was then-congressman Thad Altman, a Republican who grew up in the area and entered politics in the 1980s, motivated to protect what he considers God’s creation.
Altman remembers that era as the heyday of Republican environmentalism. Policies like the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, designed to steer investment away from vulnerable barrier islands, were starting to have an effect. On Brevard’s barrier islands, major landowners — including Disney — recognized that large-scale infrastructure expansion was unlikely and sold their plots to the state. What remained was mostly family-owned and zoned rural-residential, with no more than one dwelling per five acres.
“I thought we had a type of protection that couldn’t be undone,” Altman said. That assumption shattered in 2023 at a delegation meeting, when he realized that even the long-cherished, rural character of the southern barrier island was under threat. “It triggered me to think, ‘Oh my goodness.’”
The concept of an Area of Critical State Concern, however, immediately made sense to him. Once the bill was drafted, Altman sponsored it in the House, and his fellow Republican, Tom Wright, became its champion in the Senate.
Bipartisan support would be crucial. For that to hold, one argument had to take a backseat: Climate change. Though it was clearly reckless to build more homes and place more people on a narrow, shifting barrier island when sea levels are rising and storms intensifying, the topic has become too politically controversial to be invoked.
“Sometimes I feel like we’ve lost some environmental leverage because everything gets focused on global warming and sea-level rise, and the argument gets taken away from what we’re trying to protect immediately,” Altman said.
Instead, the Brevard barrier island case was simply framed as common sense. Adding more people would choke roads, slow evacuations and put the sea turtles at risk. It would also come as an additional cost to taxpayers, because seawalls might have to be built, and, as elsewhere, eroding beaches and dunes would need to be renourished with fresh sand worth millions of dollars.
Nobody is against development, Debby Mayfield, state senator for Brevard County, said, “but we need development that works with the environment.”
But Gallagher has seen similar common-sense efforts falter, simply because they lacked a strong advocate or got stuck in a subcommittee. “Very easily, this bill could have not gone anywhere,” she said.
That’s where the community came in. “We don’t care if you’re Republican or Independent or Democrat,” Glover said, describing one of BIPPA’s core beliefs. “We don’t talk about that. We work well together because we care about our home.”
By keeping personal politics aside and focusing on the arguments that would reach everyone, they had the numbers to keep up the ante. Their campaign for the Area of Critical State Concern was well-organized, with one person designing protest signs, another drafting email templates supporters could send to lawmakers, another hauling stacks of petitions to FedEx so hard copies landed on lawmakers’ desks. “For ten straight weeks of session, we were running a small business,” said Shantzis, who used to keep a marble bulldog labeled “tenacity” on his desk.
Any hint of political dissent in Tallahassee was met swiftly. Whenever Shantzis heard a real estate lobbyist might have sway in a committee, the group laser-focused their outreach. Some lawmakers even called BIPPA directly to say they supported the bill, then asked if the group would please stop flooding their inbox, Shantzis said.
People in Tallahassee were taking note, Gallagher said. “At every committee meeting, members talked about the number of emails and calls they were getting,” she said.
For Gallagher, watching the bill advance was a rare and exhilarating example of a community mobilizing proactively – before damage was done – and so forcefully that SB1489 and HB1686 passed with flying colors. Not a single representative voted “nay.”
“I think the local community made it undeniable that they needed to move this forward, which is unheard of,” Gallagher said
A new law – but not the end of the fight
On a rainy day in June 2023, less than four months after the bill was first introduced, Governor Ron DeSantis — the last of the elected officials who’d been flooded with BIPPA emails — signed it into law.
It’s a powerful tool, Senator Mayfield said, including for people like Kim Adkinson, the area’s newly elected county commissioner. Having grown up on the island, Adkinson recalls legions of blue crabs migrating from Indian River Lagoon to the Atlantic — with so many crossing she couldn’t avoid crushing some on her drive to school on the mainland. She hasn’t seen any in decades, and though she doubts they’ll come back, the turtles, dunes and community’s rural character can still be protected.
Now that the area was deemed worthy of protection not just by a small group of easily dismissed “tree hugger people,” but the state Legislature itself, Adkinson said, local politicians like herself could more easily fight over-development. The state mandate, she said “makes me more protective, and more willing to stick my neck out.”
That’s coming in particularly handy now. While the county has fully approved the plan, a new state law has unexpectedly stopped it from being implemented — for now. The law, SB 180, blocks governments across the state from adopting new, tougher development rules.
That means all the hard work pushing for fewer high rises is frozen in place in Brevard. But that could change, as the bill’s sponsor has admitted the bill needs fixes and dozens of local governments are suing the state over it.
What’s certain, Shantzis and others say, is that the community will keep pushing, and remain vigilant, to fully get the designation and all its protections implemented.
Ultimately, they hope to be a blueprint for other communities, he said. “If they don’t fight for their lifestyles in their different communities, they’ll go away, okay? Like it did in Miami,” he said.
This story was originally published by the Miami Herald and shared in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
