Beach bans face legal scrutiny

Brenden Leydon was a law student when he was turned away from jogging at Greenwich Point because he didn’t live in town.

The Stamford resident felt it was so unjust that he filed a lawsuit that led to a 2001 state Supreme Court ruling prohibiting Connecticut municipalities from banning nonresidents from their beaches.

But Leydon and others are saying some communities are now using the COVID-19 pandemic to skirt the Supreme Court ruling.

Communities like Stamford, Norwalk, Fairfield and East Haven have banned nonresidents from their beaches on weekends, claiming overcrowding under limited capacity could spread COVID-19. While some have questioned the legality of the bans, leaders of these communities have cited emergency orders relating to the coronavirus that give them the authority to take such measures during the pandemic.

Even Gov. Ned Lamont last week said, in response to the beach bans, that “extraordinary measures” are needed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

“You can do extraordinary measures during a pandemic, but you can’t use a pandemic as an excuse to carry out what you wanted to do beforehand,” Leydon said last week in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media.

Leydon isn’t the only one questioning the legality of the bans.

“We’ve consistently seen over the years that exclusionary communities have used moments ... to adopt these types of exclusionary measures and do so in the name of public safety,” said Andrew Kahrl, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Free the Beaches,” a book about the fight over access to Connecticut beaches. “They’re conflating two entirely separate issues here. One is limiting the crowds, which everyone should support. But they’re conflating that real public concern to help limit crowd sizes with keeping nonresidents out of public spaces. The two are entirely separate issues.”

The ACLU of Connecticut has also spoken out against these policies, saying municipalities could limit beach visitors on a first-come, first-served basis.

“There are clear signs here local officials seem to be operating under the notion their residents are more responsible than other people,” Kahrl said. “There’s a lot of assumptions baked into some of these policies. They only rarely express them in the open, but the thinking is people who are maybe of a more workingclass background and are not as educated are going to be more of a threat because they’re not as responsible. That is outright discrimination.”

The recent ban is the latest hurdle facing nonresidents trying to access the Connecticut shore. Kahrl said after the 2001 Supreme Court ruling, towns up and down the Gold Coast found ways to make beach access to out-of-towners “as complicated and daunting as possible.”

Greenwich crafted a policy requiring nonresidents to pay for both visitor and parking passes, which can only be purchased at town civic centers. Greenwich is now one of the few towns in lower Fairfield Couny allowing nonresidents to purchase passes on weekends.

Westport was criticized in 2018 for hiking annual beach passes for nonresidents

to $750 and reducing the amount available nearly in half.

“It’s all jumping though various hoops, which in practice you could say is designed to discourage people from using the public beach,” Kahrl said.

Greenwich attorney Lindy Urso has been skeptical of the state’s efforts to place restrictions to stop the spread of the virus, while noting municipalities were within their rights to restrict access to nonresidents. Though, he added, these town ordinances could be challenged.

Urso filed a lawsuit of his own against Lamont in April, when the governor ordered face coverings to be worn in public when social distancing was not possible. Urso argued the order infringed on his civil liberties.

“The virus has traveled the curve, we’re on the back end of it here in Connecticut,” he said. “I don’t think any of these measures have done anything, the masks didn’t do anything. The virus has followed its natural curve.”

Urso said he didn’t think efforts to minimize congestion at beaches or parks would have an appreciable effect on public health.

But Kahrl said the bans could remain in effect unless someone files a complaint.