Beach Policy Goes Against the Grain

GREENWICH, Conn. — This tiny beach on Long Island Sound, a haven for America’s wealthiest community, is not really much of a beach at all.

It is a cramped half-moon of gritty sand set in a cove that stifles the waves. The shoreline is so small there is not room to do much more than lie down and be quiet. Which is about all they allow here anyway. No kite flying, no Wiffle ball, no loud radios.

But the locals barred out-of-towners from using Greenwich Point Park--and two other beaches in town--and spent six years fighting challenges all the way to the state Supreme Court.

They lost last summer but then drew another line in their sand, deciding to charge nonresidents who want to enjoy a day at the beach $10 a head--plus $20 for parking.

From Maine to Malibu, public beaches have been adopting ever more draconian restrictions, and increasingly they are facing challenges--in court and in town halls.

In Greenwich, the constant carping from homeowners associations, the endless tit for tat among selectmen, the steady stream of angry letters to the editor, the competing “save our shores” groups and the costly lawsuit all may serve as a cautionary tale to governments and private citizens who try to wall off their beaches.

On the wide shores of Malibu, for example, the struggle for decades has been to get the government to do something about rich and powerful residents who block public easements. The property owners have found creative ways--such as putting up chain-link fences that jut into the water--to further the impression that they, not the public, own the beaches.

Greenwich’s courtroom defeat may be a bad sign for those in no mood to make room for more towels and chairs.

“What it comes down to is that there are more people and limited beaches and thus more challenges,” said David Bower, a University of North Carolina professor of coastal management. And with values on beachfront property soaring, the stakes are high.

Greenwich got itself in trouble in the spring of 1994 when it picked on the wrong jogger. Stamford, Conn., law student Brenden Leydon was stopped at the gate as he tried to jog through Greenwich Point Park on a sunny morning during spring break. The town custom had been that only residents could use the park and its half-mile-long beach.

That fall, Leydon was studying a case on public trust doctrine and decided to take on Greenwich.

“It is remarkable how deeply angry Greenwich is about letting in people who aren’t paying their high taxes,” said Leydon, now 33 and a partner in a small law firm in Stamford.

The case took many twists and turns over the years, but ended in July with the state Supreme Court justices ruling unanimously that excluding nonresidents would violate their 1st Amendment rights to free expression and association.

“The town lawfully cannot bar [Leydon] from Greenwich Point due solely to the fact he is a nonresident, because the park is a public forum,” Justice Richard N. Palmer wrote for the majority.

But Greenwich, a town of about 58,000, argued before the court that beaches are for suntan lotion and swimming and not “public forums” in the traditional or legal sense. Although the town tried to get other communities along Connecticut’s coastline with similar restrictions--there are at least 10--to join the case, it ended up going it alone and spending $110,000 on lawyers.

“These towns all expected Greenwich to be successful and did not want the bad publicity or expense of being involved,” said 1st Selectman Richard Bergstresser, a Democrat in a town dominated since the late 1800s by Republicans.

In fact, the protective citizens of Greenwich ended up looking like a bunch of uppity East Coast snobs.

“In hindsight, we should have settled all this a long time ago,” Bergstresser added. “But politically, any selectman who would have settled would have lost the next election. The right thing was unacceptable.”

As the weather heated up this spring, the town board of selectmen finally came up with a plan to allow outsiders to use the beaches--but at a cost of $308 for a seasonal pass and $20 for a day pass. And just for good measure, they figured nonresidents also should have to hold permits to use the public parks.

None of this played well outside Town Hall. The next day, the local paper gasped that a visitor without a day pass could get arrested for lolling about Greenwich Common, a swath of grass in the center of town with a playground donated by the Junior League. Even residents who had backed the lawsuit were appalled.

Policing the common seemed anathema to what New England towns are all about--and Greenwich was the laughingstock of the evening news.

The three selectmen--stunned by widespread news reports that emphasized the wealth in the community, where the median family income is $82,900--immediately reversed themselves and agreed to eliminate the common fee and lower the cost of a daily beach pass to $10. Season passes cost $100 per person.

Still, the board continues to debate proposals aimed at getting around the court’s decision.

Just a few weeks ago, a neighborhood association demanded that admission tickets and parking passes for one of Greenwich’s three beaches no longer be sold at its entrance. The board voted, 2 to 1, to sell them exclusively at Town Hall and a civic center a few miles from the beach--making it a little harder for folks to get there.

Hans Helbig, 79, piped up at a recent meeting that the policy welcoming nonresidents was “authoritarian.”

He complained: “I just think it’s outrageous, almost to a point where we’re reaching a socialistic point of view!”

The most vocal forces behind the no-outsiders policy have been neighbors who fear that on hot summer weekends they’ll be overrun by New Yorkers swarming from the south and Stamford residents from the north.

And while the median sales price of a house in Greenwich is $660,000, the beaches are probably the most democratic part of town. They are mostly used by those who can’t afford their own swimming pools or membership in one of Greenwich’s 17 private yacht and country clubs.

Amanda Sanger, a 21-year-old with a nose ring who had come from White Plains, N.Y., on an unseasonably warm spring day, said she thought having to spend $30 for the day at the beach was too much; she left early “because there’s no music and no boys.” Even so, she vowed to be back this summer: “This is nicer than anything we have in my town.”

As she slathered suntan lotion on around her blue flowered bikini, Betsy Scalter said she has objected to the less-restrictive policy not because “I’m some kind of elitist” but because she doesn’t want a place she has come to since childhood ruined.

“It’s that simple. More people means more cars, more garbage, more traffic jams,” she said. “It’s a peaceful place to come and I’m afraid it will change.”