When Florida lawyers asked for something to simplify title searches, the 1963 Legislature didn't think twice before passing what it called the Marketable Record Title Act. It took 23 years, an emperor's ransom in legal fees and a landmark Supreme Court decision to establish that the lawmakers hadn't unwittingly given away the public's rights to millions of acres of rivers, lakes and other so-called sovereignty lands. The legacy that our generation of Floridians inherited from our forefathers we now will be able to pass on to the future. Ah, but this is Florida.
Nothing is forever.
Cattle and timber interests, still smarting from the 1986 decision, are lobbying the Legislature for a new law that would, in effect, undo it. Landowners with deeds contradicting a public claim would triumph if they could show they had paid taxes on it. In one stroke, it would negate any state claim that the land in question had once been navigable and thus ineligible, under the Constitution at the time, for sale. As described Monday, the bill preserves the public's access to presently navigable water. The public continues to have the right to navigate over the land if sometime in the year it's got water on it.