The victors shouldn’t read too much into a retired district judge’s decision to award some attorney costs to Coeur d’Alene homeowners after the Sanders Beach struggle.

Judge James Judd’s decision to grant the property owners $25,179 of approximately $31,000 requested should be balanced against his 2005 ruling that a significant portion of the Lake Coeur d’Alene beach was public. In trying to stop angry confrontations between Sanders Beach owners and beachcombers, the city acted properly to pursue a lawsuit to force the court to decide who owns the beach.

Unfortunately, the Idaho Supreme Court overruled Judd last fall. The beach, which extends eastward from Tubbs Hill, belongs to the new breed of homeowners who moved into the nice, old homes along East Lakeshore Drive and closed off historic access to the public.

Of the current ruling, homeowners’ attorney John Magnuson said: “It means the emperor has no clothes. The spin cycle has ended.” Actually, it means the homeowners can expect police support in confrontations with beach trespassers. East Lakeshore residents can expect peace on their frontage after decades of increasingly tense encounters with sun worshippers, because Mayor Sandi Bloem’s administration pressed the issue. Most of the town considered that beach to be public. As a result, the public sometimes treated the homeowners as interlopers, prompting angry exchanges.

But there’s a bigger point here than simply who gets to enjoy Sanders Beach this summer.

Bloem’s administration is exhibiting the will and fortitude lacking in previous administrations in pushing for more public access to Coeur d’Alene’s celebrated waterways. The court test involving Sanders Beach was a reasonable response to residents who wanted the issue resolved. It wasn’t settled the way those residents wanted it to be. But not all court tests are. Importantly, while the Sanders Beach issue was moving through the courts, city officials were negotiating with Burlington Northern Santa Fe for land vacation and purchase of railroad right-of-way for the new library and a new bike trail that will extend 5.2 miles through Riverstone onto the edge of the Rathdrum Prairie.

City officials and the Lake City Development Corp. have been involved in gaining public access along the Spokane River as part of talks with developers. The Centennial Trail has been diverted off Northwest Boulevard through the Riverstone development and along the river. Nearby, the urban renewal agency has negotiated with developer John Stone to transform an old gravel pit and the area around it into a pond, amphitheater and park. At the Mill River development a little farther away, the agency and city officials have negotiated for 1,000 feet of riverfront and beach access, a park and public docks. Now the city is working with developer Marshall Chesrown to convert the DeArmond Mill property into an education corridor on the river, adjacent to North Idaho College.

City officials didn’t get the outcome they wanted on Sanders Beach. But they helped settle the ownership issue and defuse tension there. Also, they deserve credit for gaining public access to frontage that’s been blocked by industrial development for decades and might have been lost to private development forever.