by Craig Pittman, Florida Phoenix
July 31, 2025
Back when I lived in Pensacola, one of my favorite beaches was at Navarre. I’d drive out there early in the morning before work and swim for an hour or so. I’d have the place pretty much to myself — just sugar-white sand and soothing ocean waves beneath a vast and welcoming sky.
Today, though, it’s turned into a battleground.
I learned this alarming news from WEAR-TV, which last week ran a story headlined, “Navarre Beach development sparks clash over conservation, commerce priorities.”
The first two sentences sum up the situation: “A new beachfront development could be making its way to Navarre Beach. The barrier island is largely untouched, leading to lots of opposition to the proposed plan.”
The local Tourism Development Council has been pushing for construction of a boardwalk with a new welcome center, retail shops, a pavilion for food trucks, and who knows what else.
There’s even been talk of building a three-story parking garage and putting some kind of swanky restaurant on top.
Plenty of people weren’t ready to welcome the new welcome center/boardwalk/retail hub, and they listed some verrrrry good reasons for their opposition. Tamara Fountain (Photo via screengrab)
For instance, Tamara Fountain, a former Navarre Chamber of Commerce president who now manages the Navarre Beach Fishing Pier, pointed out that the land where the county wants to build all this stuff is designated for conservation, not development.
“We are headed in absolutely the wrong direction,” Fountain told the Santa Rosa County commissioners in a recent meeting. Collette Lauzau (Photo via X)
And Collette Lauzau of Audubon Florida warned that building in that spot would chase away the birds from imperiled species that roost there every year.
“They’re going to have to go and find other, less suitable habitats to try and raise their chicks on,” she said.
But one of the Santa Rosa County commissioners made a comment that sounded like he wasn’t taking these objections seriously.
“That’s prime real estate,” Commissioner Kerry Smith said. “It’s going to sell. People are going to live there. You’re not going to change these things. As far as putting a parking structure, I’m sure it is going to impact something environmentally, but when has that ever stopped anything?”
Smith’s quote made me wince like movie music maven John Williams hearing someone play his “Imperial March” from “Star Wars” on a kazoo.
But it’s an attitude we see a lot all over Florida these days.
Bloody Santa Rosa
As I have pointed out before, politics in Santa Rosa tends to be a blood sport.
One politician from there was busted for hiring a hit man to take out a popular radio commentator. The politician’s son became Florida House speaker — then went to prison for tax evasion because he failed to report the cash that corporations were slipping him under the table. His lasting legacy is the boondoggle bridge he had built, and which lost money for decades.
Navarre’s own history is — oh, let’s call it “problematic.”
Now a town of about 39,000 people, it owes its name to the wife of its founder, Guy Wyman, who had been a surveyor for the Army during World War I.
While in France, Wyman fell for a nurse named Noel. He wanted to bring Noel back to the States as his wife, but the immigration rules of the time would not allow that. A clever fellow, Wyman adopted her as his daughter to get around the rules. Then, when they got back to Florida, he married her.
When Wyman laid out plans for a new town, Noel suggested they name it for the Navarre province in Spain. It sounded more exotic than blander Panhandle hamlets, such as “Niceville.”
Then the Depression hit and the Wymans couldn’t pay their bills. To support the family, Noel went to New York to teach French. Absence, for once, did not make the heart grow fonder. The colonel took up with another woman and divorced his daughter-wife. He also warned her not to come back or he’d put a bullet in her.
She returned anyway — by some accounts to tend to a pet cemetery. Wyman shot her dead. He never spent a night in jail.
The law in those days held that Noel’s murder was her own fault, because Wyman had warned her in advance. He later became the first chief of police in the nearby town of Valparaiso.
Can you see why Navarre never has a Founder’s Day Parade?
The nastiest words
As ugly as Santa Rosa’s politics can be, the place is full of natural beauty too.
The Blackwater River, for instance, is generally regarded as one of the most pristine sand-bottom rivers on Earth.
The Naval Live Oaks Area, which dates to 1828, when the Navy built its ships out of wood, offers abundant shade and gorgeous hiking trails. It’s part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, as is Opal Beach with its sparkling white sand dunes.
That’s all before you reach the tranquil beaches of Navarre, where the fishing pier extends out for 1,545 feet, making it the longest one on the entire Gulf Coast. Navarre Beach is a birder’s paradise. Audubon describes it as having “solitary Wilson’s Plovers and Snowy Plovers as well as colonial Black Skimmer and Least Tern nesting throughout the beach community.” Workers trying to clean up BP’s oil from Navarre Beach in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Linda Young)
The birds — and everyone else — were disturbed when gooey globs of weathered oil from the massive BP spill coated the sands of Navarre Beach and the beaches of seven other Panhandle counties in 2010. All that oil poisoned both marine and human life. Julie Wraithmell (Photo via Audubon Florida)
In the ensuing legal wrangle with BP and its allies, Florida received more than $3 billion in damages. Some of that money wound up being used in Navarre to protect the habitat of imperiled shorebirds such as Snowy Plovers, said Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida.
Yet that’s the very spot where the county is planning to build its Big Boardwalk Abomination. That’s not only destructive to the environment, but it also makes the whole thing seem like a big waste of money.
Wraithmell quickly pinpointed the basic problem with the county’s approach to this property — one that you see happening all over Florida.
“I always say that the nastiest words in the English language are ‘vacant land,’” she told me. “Just because nothing’s been built on it doesn’t mean it’s not living up to its potential.”
Why go to the beach?
The funny thing is, Navarre already has a welcome center. It’s just not on the beach.
It’s called the Santa Rosa County Visitor Center. It’s on the mainland, off U.S. 98.
The idea of moving it out to the new boardwalk/retail hub/parking garage didn’t come from any tourists, or even the Tourism Development Council.
It came from one of the commissioners — the one who represents Navarre on the commission. And it was all because he had plans for the old one, he confessed during a recent meeting. Santa Rosa County Commissioner Ray Eddington (Photo via Santa Rosa County)
“I just want to use the old [welcome center] for meetings,” explained Commissioner Ray Eddington. “That’s all on me.”
Fountain, the pier manager, pointed out that the welcome center proposal was emblematic of a broader problem: The commissioners have no master plan for what they want at the beach. They were just winging it, she said.
She told commissioners that the welcome center doesn’t need to be anywhere near the waterfront. Nobody plans a vacation by picking up brochures at welcome centers anymore, she said. Instead, “we plan our vacations online.”
The commissioners, in a rare flash of good sense, agreed with her. As the Pensacola News Journal put it, they “decided using a beachside venue as a location to greet tourists was not an efficient use of tax dollars.”
But the fact that the whole place is supposed to be preserved for conservation didn’t faze them. One even commented that since it’s zoned conservation-slash-recreation, and going to the beach counts as recreation, it should be OK. Cesar Reyes of STOAA (Photo via screen grab)
If you want to stop here and do an epic eyeroll like Tina Fey on “30 Rock,” go ahead — I sure did. I rolled them even harder when I heard the architect on the project, Cesar Reyes, tell the commissioners, “We are trying to be sensitive to the environment.”
The most serious discussion among the commissioners was over whether they wanted to build a new parking lot or a parking garage in the middle of that conservation land. Traffic is a major problem in Navarre Beach. Although there have been no studies done, they were sure more parking was the solution.
They really liked the idea of a three-story garage with a restaurant on top looking out on the Gulf of Whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-week. But the price of such a grand structure — $23 million — brought their soaring imaginations crashing back to earth.
So, they may just pave over all the shorebird habitat, paint some parking spaces on it, and call it “recreation.”
As for the retail hub, the commissioners said they wanted to make sure the shops were leased to local businesses, not some chain from out of state. But when I talked to Wraithmell about all this, she made what I thought was a good point.
“Nobody goes to the beach to go shopping,” she said. “They go to the beach to go to the beach.” Navarre boardwalk plans showing retail shops. (Photo via via screen grab)
What he meant to say
I’ve talked to Commissioner Smith before, so I contacted him about that tone-deaf quote he gave WEAR-TV. You know, the one about why conservation wasn’t a valid reason for rejecting the boardwalk/welcome center/retail hub. Santa Rosa County Commissioner Kerry Smith (Photo via Santa Rosa County)
I was prepared to tell him that lots of boneheaded Florida development proposals have been rejected for environmental reasons. No. 1 on the hit parade: Gov. Ron DeSantis’ secretive plan last year to build a trio of golf courses in Jonathan Dickinson State Park.
When I reached the commissioner, he insisted that he didn’t mean to sound so callous. He said he was just trying to say that nobody in power ever seems to care about the environment while pursuing development. He swore that he’s one politician who does care.
Navarre Beach is no longer the paradise I remember, he told me. Now it has hotels and homes galore. Many of the homes, he said, have been turned into AirBnBs, catering to the tourist trade.
This is the point where I’d like to remind everyone that it’s a bad idea to build anything on a barrier island. For one thing, they tend to move around. For another, whatever you put up is likely to be buffeted by storms, flooded by storm surge, and knocked down by gale-force winds.
Five years ago, Hurricane Sally made that abundantly clear to the folks in Navarre Beach. Worse destruction around Florida came from Hurricanes Michael, Ian, Idalia, Debby, Helene, and Milton, all fed by the forces of climate change that our governor and Legislature don’t want to talk about.
Yet all over Florida, you’ll see rampant development on those same beaches, built by people who clearly don’t care about either the environment or human safety.
It’s so bad that, during a Cabinet meeting just before Hurricane Ian, a Lee County official said that the time it would take to evacuate its barrier islands was 96 hours — four days — not the legally required 16 hours.
The Lee official also said that out of Florida’s 45 coastal counties, only nine could meet that 16-hour requirement. The rest had said yes to too much development.
For all these reasons — protection of important conservation land, a general lack of planning, and a virtual certainty of storm damage — I think Smith and the other Santa Rosa commissioners need to say no to this proposal. It seems really bird-brained!
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