- December 16, 2025
The Flagler Beach City Commission will meet with state.
A divided Flagler Beach City Commission agreed, at its Thursday, Feb. 23 meeting, to bring its ongoing bonfires-on-the-beach debate to workshop with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
A week prior, a town hall forum was held to discuss the options of banning or permitting bonfires on the beach during turtle nesting season, from May 1 to Oct. 31.
“We talked about coming to compromises (at the town hall meeting),” Commissioner Steve Settle told the crowd. “Who’s got compromises?”
From those present, however — what Commission Chairwoman Jane Mealy called a “small” sample of the city — options hadn’t changed much: either ban fires altogether for six months per year, or don’t.
Commissioner Joy McGrew, citing “balance and education,” suggested either using the upcoming nesting season to measure the need for a ban or implementing a permitting process, wherein all fires between dusk and dawn would require city approval.
Still, having recently received a letter from a Volusia County woman threatening to sue if the board did not agree to a burn ban, the commission remained undecided.
Settle, who calls himself “a rules guy,” stated that he sees federal law as requiring the board to prohibit fires at night. “I’ve been told I’m somehow trying to change the cultural history of Flagler Beach,” he said, “and I’m being villainized as such.”
Mealy, as well as Mayor Linda Provencher, didn’t see the issue as so cut and dry, however.
Other major coastal cities — like Miami — don’t even have lighting ordinances in place, Mealy said. In fact, research shows that one of the largest causes of turtle death in some regions isn’t fire, but “research,” she added.
“We live in a bad economy, where doing things on the beach is nice and free,” she said.
“I believe that if you don’t clean up and you do bad things, you should get in trouble,” Provencher added. But what about those who obey all the rules — those like the Christian Surfer group — she asked? Would it be better to tell this group of teenagers that instead of sitting with their parents around a fire, learning about marine life, that they have to find something else to do? “I just don’t want to go down a slippery slope, where all of a sudden more and more things are being taken from us,” she said.
The commission will continue discussions with state officials.
