Pensacola Beach's tax, lease history is subject of new book

"Deceit Beach" By William L. Post Publisher: Trent's Prints & Publishing (Chumuckla, FL) ISBN: 10:: 1-934035-42- 4 / 13: 978-1-934035- 42-9 92 pp. plus 33 pages of appendices and an index Price: $29.95 ($24.95 for Florida residents) Pensacola Beach resident William L. Post just published "Deceit Beach," a 92-page (not counting appendices) historical analysis of the "tax-free" promises made, nationwide, by Escambia County officials to encourage development of Santa Rosa island.

The book is both a narrative history of the tax-free promise that made development of Pensacola Beach possible and a compilation of reproduced historical documents from 1949 to 1969.

Post, who is 56 years old, holds an advanced degree in chemistry from Auburn University. He has been a Pensacola Beach resident since 1993 when he retired from the oil industry. His interest in beach history was piqued 11 years later when, as he writes, "Chris Jones, the Property Appraiser for Escambia County ... and Janet Holley, the Tax Collector ... decided it was time in 2004 to tax the [Pensacola Beach] leaseholders as if the leaseholds were deeded real property."

What ensued for Post was a 16-month odyssey through the dusty archives of the Santa Rosa Island Authority, the records of the Escambia County Commission, local public libraries, law libraries, university "special" collections usually not available to the general public, and countless other repositories of historical documents.

The book provides the reader with a clear chronological time line of how, why, when, and which public officials at the federal, state and local levels engineered, and then widely promoted, the express promise that beach leaseholds would remain free from ad valorem taxation for the duration of their renewable leases. Included in Chapter 7 are 15 pages indexing key documents from governmental files and clues to where even more can be found.

Beach readers are likely to find most compelling 41 pages of reproductions of merely some among the hundreds of newspaper and magazine ads, pamphlets, tourist brochures, and other printed media showing how explicitly the Island Authority, Escambia County itself, and even the State of Florida put the governmental imprimatur on their "tax free" promises, from coast to coast in order to attract individuals and families to settle on Pensacola Beach and contribute to its development.

The reproductions in Post's book, although in black and white, are the clearest, cleanest, and most easily readable we have ever seen. In some cases, we recognized ads from the SRIA's muddy archives of reproductions which we and select other residents have seen before; but Post appears to have tracked down the originals, or as close to them as one can get, and the results are stunning. The assembly of documents in itself is compelling evidence that somewhere,

someone has been deceiving the public about Pensacola Beach.

"The county flat-out did 20 years of advertising promising no taxation, ever," Post told us today. Those promises were unequivocal, he adds:

These days, I see some county politicians and even state judges trying to say that the ads only described the 'present' condition, as it was back then, of no taxation - as if no one promised that the tax free exemption would remain that way. But you can't read these advertisements or the minutes of governmental meetings at the time without concluding that is simply wrong. Repeatedly, Escambia County and the SRIA made the explicit promise that the exemption would be binding on the government in the future, too.

To order an advance copy of Deceit Beach, until distribution begins, at the moment you have to email the author: WilliamLPost@hotmail.com.