High Fairfield County beach pass fees hinder accessibility to town beaches, areas with high water quality

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

By Sanchali Singh

(FAIRFIELD COUNTY, Conn.) As summer humidity and rising temperatures descend on Connecticut, many residents are turning to the numerous Fairfield County beaches to beat the heat. Unfortunately, the high cost of daily and seasonal passes for out-of-towners excludes some county residents from these marine oases, including those with high water quality.

In contrast to the West Coast, where beaches are typically free, it is common for East Coast beaches to charge for access. New Jersey notoriously charges people just to enter the beach area, even if they aren’t parking in the beach lot. Many New York beaches are still private and don’t allow public access. Other beaches in Connecticut outside of Fairfield County also charge fees, like Clinton Town Beach and Ocean Beach Park in New London.

Fairfield County lays claim to eight coastal towns, all of which have at least one beach.

During the summer, all municipal governments in the county charge an out-of-town resident fee for day passes, ranging from as low as $25 for a Connecticut-registered car at Beardsley Park in Bridgeport to as high as $70 on the weekends for Westport’s Compo Beach.

In addition to fees for out-of-towners, a majority of towns and cities charge a seasonal pass fee for residents. The only anomalies in the county that don’t charge their residents to visit their beaches are Norwalk and Stratford.

Westport by far has the highest fees of any Fairfield County beach. Of the more affluent county towns, Westport charges its residents with cars and motorcycles registered in town $50 for a seasonal parking emblem. Compare that to the $775 fee for nonresidents who don’t pay Westport taxes and want to buy a full-season pass, which doesn’t include the state sales tax.

Westport also limits the number of nonresident parking emblems it gives out each year to 350 and isn’t the only town to restrict the number of out-of-town residents that can visit — out-of-state passes in Bridgeport are limited to 20% of the beach’s capacity.

Norwalk, another town that enacted restrictions on out-of-town beachgoers, announced in May that it is piloting a nonresident parking area at Calf Pasture Beach this summer as part of its plan to reconfigure the parking lot. The designated area is only 10% of the beach’s entire parking lot and if the area reaches capacity, the city said it would close it until 4 p.m., “regardless of what time it reached capacity.”

Connecticut has a history of excluding people from town beaches. In 2001, the Connecticut Supreme Court issued a ruling affirming that nonresidents have the right to use town parks and beaches throughout the state, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The case went to the state’s highest court after a law student filed a lawsuit challenging a Greenwich ordinance that restricted the use of town parks and beaches by nonresidents.

David McGuire, the executive director of the ACLU’s Connecticut chapter, said high fees imposed by cities and towns are intentional and are meant to keep nonresidents out of beaches.

“What ended up happening in the following 20 years [after the court case], is that many Connecticut towns on the waterfront have used other means to prevent people not from the town from accessing the beach,” he said.

McGuire added that the high prices imposed by towns and cities, in addition to minimal parking available and charging “exorbitant amounts” to park near the beach, are seen by the ACLU as a racial justice issue because these barriers are implemented intentionally to keep nonresidents out.

“These are intentionally high, expensive barriers that people need to overcome to gain access to a beach,” he said. “These are not unintended consequences or outcomes. They very much designed these systems with this in mind.”

McGuire mentioned how some towns have different tiers of parking passes with varying prices to include out-of-town residents, but only from selected areas. For example, Westport has high prices for nonresident passes but offers a discounted seasonal pass priced at $375 for neighboring Weston residents. In Norwalk, residents of New Canaan, Redding, Ridgefield, Weston and Wilton can purchase a 2021 Landlocked Non Resident permit for $325, but no seasonal pass is offered for residents of other towns.

“It is largely white affluent towns that are trying to keep Black and brown people and people that do not have the means out of their towns and beaches,” McGuire said. “And that is deeply problematic. The beaches and parks are community resources that should be open to everyone.”

Fairfield’s counter-response

Anthony Calabrese, director of the Fairfield Parks and Recreation Department, said that the town isn’t trying to manage the number of people coming to the beach through passes, but instead is trying to align with fees imposed by other towns.

According to Calabrese, Fairfield normally increases beach fees when neighboring towns do so. The department’s nine-member commission decides fees almost every year; this year’s prices are the same as last year and charge nonresidents $50 on the weekend per car.

“We’re typically in the middle to lower end of the pack when it comes to fees,” Calabrese said of the town’s fees in comparison to the rest of the county.

Pass revenue doesn’t go toward beach maintenance, which is paid for by Fairfield property taxpayers, but instead goes towards the town’s general fund.

Calabrese said funding that the department receives from the town goes toward beach expenses, like grooming, replenishing sand and staffing for lifeguards and parking attendants.

In recent years, Fairfield has been selling about 35,000 resident passes and 1,000 to 1,100 nonresident passes in a year. Calabrese said the number of nonresident seasonal passes, which is currently priced at $250, has gone down as the town increased fees.

“I love having as many people as possible at our beaches,” the director said. “It just ends up being more crowded. You know, most people don’t like crowded beaches.”

A problem of water quality and accessibility

With high-priced beach passes, those without a lot of expendable income might be dissuaded from exploring other beaches, including those with higher water quality because the county’s best ranked beaches impose high daily rates.

Save the Sound, a nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental action in the Long Island area, recently released a report ranking which Connecticut and New York beaches have the best water quality.

The report focuses on the amount of fecal matter found in the water, either from humans or wildlife. In a statement, Save the Sound cited a number of reasons why beaches have low water quality. The main problem is rain because it carries stormwater runoff or sewer line overflow into other bodies of water.

The report said that the “first flush” of rain “empties out waste built up in storm drains, washes wildlife waste off the nearby landscape and delivers the pollution on the beach and riverbanks into the water.” The report also found that “overall water quality failure rates doubled when it rained, from 5.5% in dry weather to 11.4% even 48 hours after wet weather.”

Tracy Brown, regional director of Water Protection for Save the Sound and the report’s author, said swimming in contaminated water can cause serious health problems.

“If you swim in water with high fecal bacteria levels you can get a whole host of illnesses,” she said. “Most common are gastrointestinal illness and swimmer’s ear, but more serious diseases can also be contracted.”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, swimming in water contaminated with fecal bacteria can also lead to respiratory illnesses and skin, ear, eye, sinus and wound infections.

The report highlighted that as climate change worsens, rain events will become more common, leading to more pollution in waterways like the Long Island Sound over the next decades.

But because of the high price of beaches in the county, many people who can’t afford to splurge on beach fees have to settle for their town’s beach or the beach with the lowest day or seasonal pass.

In a local Facebook group, Norwalk residents recently complained about the high fees for parking at the city beach with an out-of-town car. After a mom described how visiting friends wanted to visit Calf Pasture Beach but would have to take two cars and pay the daily fee of $40, Norwalk residents tried to offer ways to get around paying the daily parking fee. Suggestions included overcrowding one car, taking multiple trips or borrowing a neighbor’s car.

Other residents suggested visiting Connecticut’s state parks, where parking at some locations is free for those with in-state license plates. Unfortunately, the Save the Sound report didn’t include any state parks in its top-ranking list of Connecticut beach water quality.

Of Connecticut beaches, the top 10 report from June listed two Fairfield County beaches, Stamford’s Quigley Beach and Burying Hill Beach in Westport, for having high water quality. Brown said the published list only includes public beaches as a way to promote beach accessibility.

To compare public and private beaches, Brown and her team added private beaches to the list but found that the top 10 beaches in Connecticut didn’t change since most are public now after the 2001 court case.

Change in the legislative works

Connecticut lawmakers have tried recently to regulate the price of beach passes for out-of-town residents. In the past legislative session, State Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, introduced a bill to stop municipalities from charging high fees that restrict public access, according to CT Post.

Lemar was motivated to introduce the bill after seeing increased beach restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many towns in 2020 introduced new rules that prohibited out-of-town residents from entering the beach as a way to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, according to Lemar, these new restrictions were just an extension of Connecticut’s long history of exclusion.

“The towns that were the most egregious at this were the same towns that have spent the better part of the last century banning access to their communities — through people who can live there, restrictive land use, zoning and housing discrimination,” he told NewsBreak.

Lemar’s bill did not pass through the Planning and Development Committee, CT Post reported. He told NewsBreak that suburban Democrats didn’t want to move the bill forward because they value exclusion in the state over allowing the public to take advantage of their resources.

Lemar said this doesn’t just happen at the state level. He cited hearing municipal officials publicly say they are trying to “manage the demand” of the beaches, but at hearings with just the community they “talk about purposefully excluding out-of-town folks.”

The beach accessibility issue in Connecticut is a combination of a number of problems in the state, according to Lemar. Racism and exclusivity mesh together to create “really expensive gates” barring outsiders from town residents’ resources.

Other towns outside of Fairfield County are currently experiencing the same exclusion tactics. In Old Lyme, two beach community leaders want to increase the parking fee for out-of-towners to park at the town’s free beach specifically to discourage them from visiting, according to The Day. Town leaders there suggested higher parking fees to cut down on littering and “rude behavior” at the beaches, Miami Beach Association President Mark Mongillo said.

During public debates regarding the bill, Lemar said he heard people say that towns need to limit the number of people who don’t live in the community visiting beaches, claiming that out-of-town beach pass fees go towards maintenance and upkeep. But, Lemar told NewsBreak, they’re actually just “profit centers” for the towns.

Lemar cited the example of Fairfield, where revenue from beach passes goes to the town’s general fund. Even though money from beach passes eventually gets sent back to the recreation department for expenses, some funding may be used in other departments if the parks and recreation budget is less than beach pass revenue.

Calabrese had differing opinions and said, “I don’t think [the passes] are exclusionary at all.” The parks and recreation director said that if beaches were made to be free at a state level, it would put a strain on the town if they didn’t receive state funding to maintain the beaches.

“My argument would be that it’s not fair to charge the residents of Fairfield the full beach cost for somebody that lives in Litchfield or a town that doesn’t have a beachfront,” Calabrese said. “Unless that state was going to subsidize the revenue that we bring in, that’s a different discussion.”

Lemar plans on reintroducing the bill in the future, hopefully during the next legislative session in February 2022 through the Transportation Committee. He said he might change the bill to align more with the committee, such as focusing on transportation barriers that towns impose to restrict parking and public transportation near beaches.

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