Riviera Beach critic Fane Lozman lost a legal ruling last month that determined he does not own the submerged land beneath a private dock on Singer Island.
But, he said he won a fire station instead.
And he claims, the legal ruling puts into question the property line for hundreds of Singer Island homeowners, creating potential chaos.
But there’s an alternative reading of the June 24 order issued by Palm Beach County Circuit Judge James Nutt in a case that turned on an 1858 land survey and a 1924 deed. And that is, as the judge declared in his order, it affects just the western boundary of Lozman’s submerged land and nothing else.
Judge Nutt’s ruling is based on a property marker lost to history.
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Nutt embraced a new corner monument to mark the southeastern point of Section 22, a one-square-mile area that includes upland portions of the island and submerged lands in the Intracoastal Waterway.
He said the ruling must be narrowly construed to affect just the western boundary of Lozman’s property.
But it can’t affect just the western edge, Lozman and his attorneys argue. They’ve asked the court for a clarification but point to a survey filed by the winning side’s surveyor that shows the effect of moving the western boundary of 309 acres conveyed in a 1924 state deed on its eastern boundary.
The survey shows Lozman’s portion of the 309 acres emerging from the submerged lands of the Intracoastal Waterway to the uplands of the island. The boundary jumps over North Ocean Drive and engulfs half of the site of city Fire Station No. 86 and a neighboring city property containing a water tank.
“Since 1915, over 1,000 surveys and everybody had no problem and one guy pops up and says the section corner should be moved and that’s the gospel?” Lozman asked. “By moving the section corner, he’s clouded everybody’s title.”
Lozman, who became a millionaire when he invented software used to track stock trades, has a history of confrontation with the city dating back 20 years. Twice he has appealed city actions to the U.S. Supreme Court and twice he has won.
The feud hasn’t dimmed.
After Lozman parked his 39-foot speed boat on the 1.5-acre fire station property this month, the city had it towed. He paid $500 to get it back.
After that, the fire station sported no parking signs.
City officials took three weeks to respond to numerous requests for comment from Stet News, saying that the court’s opinion “was very clear” that the ruling applies only to the dock case.
At last week’s council meeting, City Manager Jonathan Evans said the city attorney was drafting a memo to share with council members.
City Council member Glen Spiritis, who represents Singer Island, offered some insight into the city’s response.
“It’s the opinion of the city that it did not move the eastern boundary, just the western boundary,” Spiritis said in an interview. “Clearly this is not something that the city would be happy with if the eastern boundary is changed.”
Why change the section marker?
The decision to challenge the section marker laid down in 1915 was made by attorneys defending the city against Lozman in a federal lawsuit. Lozman filed the suit, saying the city had diminished the value of his submerged land through a zoning change.
The city’s surveyor in the federal lawsuit, George C. “Chappy” Young, conducted a “retracement survey” to track down the location of the original, lost section marker, which dated to 1858. He certified the new location with state officials in November 2022.
In ruling against Lozman last year, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks considered the retraced 1858 section marker but did not adopt it.
The dock owner who sued Lozman over control of his dock off Pine Point Road, Davender Kant, hired Young and submitted the same survey to Judge Nutt.
Young’s report said the methodology used to place the marker in 1915 was wrong. He retraced the site of the 1858 marker to a loading dock at the Palm Beach Marriott Singer Island Beach Resort & Spa, 3800 N. Ocean Drive. That’s about 65 feet northeast of the 1915 marker.
After 1915, most land development on Singer Island had been based on the 1915 cornerstone. Hundreds of homes sprang up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s on landfill west of Ocean Drive.
Palm Beach Isles, Yacht Harbor Manor and the Pine Point subdivisions sit on that once submerged land.
The 1915 section line shoots straight through the backyards dividing homes on the south side of Bimini Lane in Palm Beach Isles from those on the north side of Manor Drive in Yacht Harbor Marina.
But the 1858 section line would cut the homes on Bimini Lane in half.
If the judge were to adopt the 1858 marker and throw out the 1915 marker, chaos would ensue. The dispute centers on whether Judge Nutt did so.
Dispute over a private dock
Misgivings about the 1915 section marker are not new.
They emerged as far back as 1924, when the state of Florida relied on it to sell 309 acres of submerged land to a developer.
Lozman and partner Daniel Halley, acting under the name Halo Development, bought a 30-acre remnant of that 1924 land to the north of the landfilled subdivisions in 2019. Lozman claimed that Kant’s 140-foot dock sat on his land. He fenced off access to the dock and began using it.
Kant, a retired Riviera Beach planning and zoning director, built the dock in 1990 and had suffered no loss of access even after a 1998 request from the submerged land owner who predated Lozman.
After Lozman refused Kant’s demand to remove the fence, Kant sued in January 2020 and sought an injunction to block Lozman. Nutt granted the injunction in August 2020 and held a one-day trial in April 2023.
With the injunction in effect, Nutt went 14 months before calling the sides together with nine days' notice to deliver closing arguments on June 21. Nutt was moving to the criminal division and would no longer be handling civil lawsuits.
He issued his order three days later.
Judge Nutt’s order
Since other owners whose properties stem from the Section 22 corner monument were not parties to the lawsuit, they’re not affected, the judge ruled.
“It is important to note the court’s findings with respect to the parties’ western boundary dispute are limited to and based solely upon the record and addresses the (sic) only the western boundary,” Nutt wrote.
Nutt, a former attorney with the South Florida Water Management District and a 2017 Rick Scott appointee, explained that he had to consider the new section corner to determine Halo’s western boundary because Halo’s deed is based on the 1924 legal description.
In that 1924 deed, the Florida Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund, or TIIF, sold 309 acres of submerged land to developer Lake Worth Realty. Lozman’s Halo bought 30 of those acres.
The property description in Halo’s deed defines the starting point as Section 22 “as established by William J. Reyes, Deputy United States Survey, in October 1858.”
The state used the 1915 corner even though it was derived by “a different method from that used in the original location of this corner,” the TIIF’s chief drainage engineer wrote to Lake Worth Realty’s attorney in April 1924.
The engineer explained his concerns.
“While we have no data in this office that we could swear to, yet I have information to the effect that (the) corner as above relocated is not in the same place as the original corner,” the engineer’s report said, according to an excerpt in Young’s report.
“I understand that the section corner at present used has been agreed to by interested landowners, but in my judgement, it would be a good idea to have this location verified,” he wrote. “Property is so valuable and increasing in value so rapidly in that locality, that care in (the) correct location is highly desirable.”
Judge supports retracing the 1858 marker
Nearly 100 years later, Young’s survey set out to find the proper starting point for the 1924 TIIF deed. He traced it to a point under the Marriott loading dock.
Judge Nutt embraced Young’s work, starting his explanation with the surveyor who conducted the 1858 survey, Reyes.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Reyes’ survey was based upon a monument (original cornet) that was lost. Plaintiff’s two expert surveyors followed customary surveying practices to retrace and reestablish the original corner and thus the starting point for calculating (Lozman’s) western boundary. Both experts independently determined the commonly used corner upon which defendant (Lozman) depends to be incorrect.”
When the west boundary is measured from the 1858 section marker, Judge Nutt ruled, it does not reach Kant’s dock.
Lozman countered that the 1924 TIIF deed relied on the 1915 marker, not the lost 1858 location, so it is unfair now to rely on the 1858 marker to determine his property’s boundary. Such an action would shift all the subdivisions that emerged from the 309-acre TIIF deed, not just his property, he said.
Making it more confounding is that state and local governments for years relied on the 1915 marker, he said. For instance, a 1963 Singer Island bulkhead map signed by the Riviera Beach mayor and produced by the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund is based on the 1915 marker.
“Since 1915, there have been over 1,000 surveys and everybody had no problem and one guy pops up and says the section corner should be moved and that’s the gospel?” Lozman said. “Why listen to Chappy Young and no one else? Because you’re an environmental judge and you want to (mess with) Fane Lozman?”
Nutt insisted that his ruling affects only property conveyed with a reference to the 1858 section marker.
“The question becomes how far west the TIFF deed extends,” Nutt wrote. “That depends upon the original survey upon which the TIFF deed was created. The legal description of the property conveyed by the TIIF deed refers to and incorporates the original (1858) survey of a Mr. Reyes.
“That original survey thus governs.”
The judge’s arguments were buttressed by a February memo submitted by Kant’s attorney, Devon Woolard of Shutts & Bowen.
“To the extent non-parties later have a boundary dispute concerning different properties, property descriptions, and different facts, they would not be bound by this court’s ruling,” she wrote.
Woolard did not return phone calls and emails from Stet News seeking comment on her memo, which continued: “No upland property owner south of the Pine Point Subdivision will be affected.”
‘It’s a ripple effect’
Judge Nutt’s ruling doesn’t make sense to Jim Ryan, a North Palm Beach property law attorney who began working on submerged land issues off of Singer Island in the 1960s as a law student.
Ryan, who has represented Lozman in the federal case and whose brother, Michael, represented Lozman in the dock dispute, said affirming the new section corner is likely to cause headaches for neighbors.
If they try to sell their home, with a legal description based on the old location of Section 22, they may have trouble getting title insurance, he said.
“You can’t shift one property 60 feet north and not affect the property lines of every neighboring property,” he said. “It’s a ripple effect.”
Still, Singer Island property owners have a good case, he said.
“They have improved their property and used it so they have a valid argument that they are entitled to a quiet-title action confirming that they own what they think they own,” he said.
“And they’d probably win that.”
But it may not come to that, said Lisa Interlandi, a land-use lawyer who has opposed Lozman’s efforts to develop his submerged lands but is not a party to the dock case.
“The 1915 marker continues to exist. It is not wiped out,” she said. “You own what your legal description says you own but for its western boundary, the Halo legal description expressly references the original deed from the state, which was based on the 1858 section corner.”
But what of the eastern boundary?
Lozman calculates that if his west boundary moves east, his eastern boundary must move east as well.
“You’ve changed the western boundary. Now please tell us where our eastern boundary is,” Lozman’s attorney, Jonathan O’Boyle, said in an interview. “You can’t have it based on two section corners.”
On July 11, he filed a motion asking Judge Nutt to clarify his ruling.
Lozman argues the TIIF deed can’t be reduced from its intended 309 acres. To move the western boundary and not the eastern, would shrink his holdings, which derived from the original state land.
And his point is reflected on Young’s survey, which shows the shifting location for the TIIF deed property. Lozman’s holdings in that map cross Ocean Drive.
But Lozman’s deed clearly states that his eastern boundary is State Road 703 — Ocean Drive, Interlandi said.
The city fire station and water tank are west of the road.
“The submerged landowners likely never owned to the eastern boundary of the TIIF deed but just a portion of that,” she said. “The road is the eastern boundary.”
Lozman doesn’t buy it.
“You can’t stop at the road because if you stop at the road you don’t have 309.11 acres,” as sold by the state in 1924, he said.
Now that he has his boat back, he plans to park it once again at the city fire station.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
