The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Capacity issues at some CT beaches prompt fairness questions
Connecticut state parks and beaches that were swamped with visitors early in the pandemic — leading to hundreds of closures — kicked off a new summer tourism season Friday with Gov. Ned Lamont pledging services to keep access open particularly along the sliver of coastline that remains in state hands.
In preparation for the Memorial Day kickoff to summer, Lamont’s administration announced this week the expansion of last year’s pilot program to offer free shuttle service to a number of state parks as well as the launch of a $3 million ad campaign to entice visitors from surrounding states.
The governor then traveled on Friday to
Hammonasset Beach State Park — one of the shoreline’s most popular attractions, with more than 3.4 million visitors last year — to formally inaugurate the summer under cool, cloudy skies.
“A lot of people have rediscovered what makes Connecticut such an amazing place over the last couple summers,” said Lamont, who donned aviators for a brief stroll along the beach as the fog lifted. “More visitors to our parks, more visitors to our beaches, what’s amazing is a 15 minute drive, you can get to a beautiful beach or you can get to a ski mountain resort. You have incredible diversity right here.”
The surging interest in Connecticut’s parks and beaches — which are free to state residents — has also strained the state’s ability to accommodate the crowds and rejuvenated efforts to open up access at exclusive town beaches that charge hundreds of dollars to out-of-towners for access to the shoreline.
“I always find it a little tone deaf for the state to be promoting itself to Connecticut residents as this great staycation, and talk about all the wonderful events you can do,” said state Rep. Roland Lemar, D- New Haven, who has pushed unsuccessfully for legislation to cap the amount that municipalities can charge non-residents for beach access.
“People here think of summers as going to the beach and you can’t do it in Connecticut,” Lemar said.
Even prior to the pandemic, the increasing number of visitors at Connecticut state
parks had led to more capacity related closures, according to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, which manages parks.
In 2011, state parks and beaches were closed on 27 separate occasions when parking lots became full to their limits. By 2019, that number had risen to 120.
Then in 2020, visits to parks swelled by nearly 50 percent even as capacity limits were lowered to allow for social distancing — forcing more than 500 park closures over the course of the year, according to DEEP.
While DEEP was unable to provide Hearst Connecticut Media with data on park closures in 2021, a spokesman for the department said this week that parks “reverted to a more normal pattern of closures” even as overall attendance topped 13 million visitors.
“Being outside there’s a lot less risk so we were able to really reduce the amount of capacity closures we were undertaking,” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said Friday. “It still happens, especially on those holiday weekends [when the] temperature goes up a certain amount especially in the early part of the summer. Or in the fall, some of those places like Sleeping Giant that are really popular for leaf peeping, we can hit capacity and close.”
When larger parks like Hammonasset reach their capacity, local officials complain that it can send a wave of beach goers into surrounding towns where they quickly fill parking lots and the town beaches — which officials say is part of the justification for charging higher fees to non-residents.
Rick Maynard, the direction of Parks and Recreation in Guilford, defended the town’s $70 season beach pass required for non-residents to access the town’s two beaches on Long Island Sound and Lake Quonnipaug, calling it “very reasonable” in testimony submitted to lawmakers opposing the bill to cap fees for non-residents at 50 percent the amount that residents are charged.
Guilford charges non-residents twice the $35 amount it charges locals to use the beach for a season.
“People were coming from New York and New Jersey to Hammonasset at 9:30 in the morning and it was full,” during the pandemic, Maynard recalled on Friday. “So, I was seeing a lot of New York and New Jersey plates in the parking lot.”
Similar discrepencies between residents and non-residents are present along the shoreline. In Stamford, residents pay $26.59 for a seasonal pass, while non-non residents are charged $292.46, although a day pass can be purchased for $42.50. While Stratford residents can gain access by showing proof of a motor vehicle tax bill, visitors are charged $250 for a season pass or either $20 or $40 for a day pass, based on the day of the week. Further east, in East Lyme, residents pay $45 for a season pass, while non-residents are charged $175 for the season.
Continued closures
Officials on Friday contended that the majority of capacity-related closures at state parks are limited to smaller, inland parks such as Kent Falls and Miller’s Pond, which have less parking capacity than the shoreline parks built to accommodate hundreds or thousands of daily visitors.
In 2019 — the last year for which DEEP provided data on individual park closures
— the state’s large shoreline beaches at Rocky Neck, Sherwood Island, Silver Sands and Hammonasset were closed on six occasions, accounting for 5 percent of total park closures that year.
“They really are few and far between at the bigger facilities that really can accommodate the public,” said Tom Tyler, DEEP’s director of state parks.
For supporters of expanded beach access, however, the sky-high fees charged at municipal beaches remains a significant barrier for many Connecticut residents, particularly those who live in lower income communities without local access to the shoreline.
“It speaks to segregation,” said state Rep. Geraldo Reyes, D- Waterbury, who chairs the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus and supports efforts to cap local beach fees. “You can come here and do whatever you want to, but you cannot go over there… when you start doing things like that you’re segregating.”
Reyes said that the protests raised by local leaders in support of beach fees can also serve as a signal to many minority residents that they are simply not welcome at some shoreline communities, a feeling that other activists trace back to the state’s decades-long fight over access to the shoreline, 80 percent of which is held in private hands.
“This is deeply rooted, it’s been happening in Connecticut a long time,” said Scot X. Esdaile, the president of the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP.
Speaking to reporters at Hammonasset on Friday, Lamont said he hoped to avoid having the state get involved with capping municipal beach fees and instead pointed to his administration’s investments state parks and beaches, which he said would preserve part of the shoreline for all Connecticut residents.
“That’s part of the answer, I think, is to do more to make more access available,” Lamont said. “They’re not making any more beachfront property here so we have to do everything we can to preserve it and make sure we have easier access… We’ve got to make sure it’s available to all our people.”
Lamont also touted the free shuttle program to parks, which will run until Labor Day bringing visitors to seven state parks: Hammonasset, Silver Sands, Osborndale, Indian Well, Sleeping Giant and Sherwood Island. The shuttles will provide connections to existing bus routes, as well as to commuter rail lines.
The shuttle service, known as ParkConneCT, provided more than 3,000 passenger trips in 2021, according to the Department of Transportation.