Melissa Kells-Burdick put herself on the waitlist for a Narragansett Town Beach cabana right around the time her youngest son was born. She had two other little kids at the time, and a cabana would have been a convenient way to store her stuff while she was toting her youngins to the beach.
Her youngest son is now 13. Her other children are 16 and 18, now too old to be toted anywhere. And yet she’s still on the waiting list — closer to the top, tantalizingly close, but not close enough to actually get there: She’s No. 17 out of 348 people who want a prized beach cabana. They cost $2,500 a year to rent, but in addition to the storage space and showers, they include a dedicated parking spot by a more secluded stretch of sand, as well as guest passes.
People don’t give these cabanas up easily.
“It’s been a long time,” Kells-Burdick said. “My kids always ask me, ‘Why didn’t we get one?’ I’m like, ‘Baby, I tried, I tried!’”
And how much turnover was there from 2020 to 2021? How much closer did Kells-Burdick and the 348 others get to their goal? Zero. Nobody gave up a cabana. Like a state legislature dominated by incumbents, the same people who had one of 83 beach cabanas in 2020 had one in 2021.
People like Kells-Burdick say something has to change. Others go a step further and say the town shouldn’t be in the business of creating a quasi-private enclave for a select few. But change will not come easily: Narragansett has long allowed people to renew their cabana leases indefinitely, and pass them on to a second lease-holder if they die or are no longer interested. People who have them now want to keep them.
One member of an advisory committee on recreation in Narragansett floated the idea earlier this year of imposing term limits on cabanas. Someone — nobody’s sure who — printed out a copy of an agenda item for an August meeting and slipped it under all 83 cabana doors. They were also placed in the smaller changing rooms and lockers that are only slightly less coveted.
More than 100 people came to the meeting, a standing-room-only crowd, and depending on whom you ask, angrily denounced the possibility of change or calmly denounced the possibility of change. Though some wanted term limits, according to one attendee, the general tenor was along the lines of: “How dare you take away my life, liberty and cabana?”
The divisions all seem to go back to the bitter debate over whether and where to build a new library in town, which tore a rift in the community that has not closed.
“People were so angry, and I was so disappointed, because people were just so angry about even having a discussion in a respectful way,” said Susan Cicilline Buonanno, a councilwoman who serves on the advisory board. She is 40th on the cabana waiting list, holds a beach locker and recuses herself from advisory votes related to cabanas. “In 20 years of public service, I’ve never seen the dialogue be so contentious.”
The debate is a very Rhode Island sort of thing: a political fight over term limits on beach access. But it also speaks to larger questions coursing through this beautiful seaside town: Who’s the beach for?
Narragansett Town Beach is often voted as one of the best beaches in New England, and it’s easy to see why: a pristine stretch of sand, a view of the Towers, surfer-friendly waves and kid-friendly amenities. It’s the only major seaside beach for which a walk-in fee is required, Jersey-style; some have long criticized that setup, but even people on the Town Council who don’t like it say that ship has sailed.
In some ways it’s a victim of its own success. Some longtime residents say it’s getting too crowded. The Town Council leading up to this past season raised that walk-on fee from $10 to $12. That was scaled back from the previous council’s decision to charge $15 a head.
Some people, including members of the advisory board, have proposed hiking fees again — walk-on fees back to $15, and increased parking fees — which they say will help make up for increased costs.
People like Jill Lawlor, a former councilwoman, go so far as to argue that Narragansett Town Beach is not actually a public beach, but a town beach where the public is allowed. Allies are pushing for a carrying capacity study to see what should be done to limit crowds.
“The town’s responsibility is to its residents first,” Lawlor said.
Critics say it’s a thinly disguised effort to prevent people from outside Narragansett or people of lesser means from coming to the beach — which, they say, is very much a public beach.
And business owners like Stephen Brophy, of Brickley’s Ice Cream, say the town has already gone too far in limiting access to the beach. That hurts local businesses like his.
“Any time you make it more expensive to go to that beach, you just gave them another reason not to go to Narragansett and to go to the state beaches,” Brophy said.
There’s little appetite, according to Council President Jesse Pugh, to raise fees two years in a row. An ascendant council majority is working to open more access. Those efforts include a committee that met in an un-air conditioned conference room at Town Hall Wednesday night to kick around ideas for improving shoreline access for an hour and a half.
“We do prioritize the residents,” Pugh said, “but there’s a limit to how far we’re going to go.”
There might, however, be some political will over term limits for beach cabanas. The issue comes up, usually in whispers, but because of ferocious backlash, a wholesale change of the rules hasn’t gotten anywhere. It’s possible that will change this year; it would ultimately be up to the Town Council to decide. (The recreation board that had the contentious meeting in August is an advisory one and can’t actually change any rules, only make recommendations. Its chair has a cabana lease.) The recent focus on coastal access issues on both sides has thrust cabanas into the forefront.
“There’s a hyper focus on the beach in general, on both sides,” Pugh said. “Some want to make it more exclusive. Coastal access is generally a big issue. That’s all kind of colliding at the same time.”
Just like it’s easy to see why people want to go to Narragansett Town Beach, it’s easy to see why people really want cabanas, which are available from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The name might evoke a fruity tropical drink and palm fronds on a cloudless day. The U-shaped building, most recently rebuilt at a cost of about $1 million from the town’s beach fund, looks more like a nicer roadside motel, each windowless unit padlocked on a recent hot mid-September day.
But people speak of the insides reverently: There’s a hook to hang beach chairs and other assorted gear, areas to get changed, and a shower to blast off the day’s detritus. Drinking is not allowed on the beach, but if you were to sneak a Narragansett lager in a Narragansett cabana? Who would know? Who could possibly object to such a private extravagance?
Conrad Ferla does. A coastal access advocate and surfer who lives in South Kingstown, Ferla objects to the whole idea of beach cabanas for an exclusive few — especially one that’s undergone millions in renovations after recent storms. Some cabana-holders have tried to eject kids from using the beach in front of the building, said Ferla, who lives in South Kingstown and grew up in Narragansett.
“It’s giving people some weird sort of entitlement. I think they have a little bit of Dunes Club envy,” he said, referring to the private beach club down Boston Neck Road.
While many people call for an increase in walk-on fees, there’s a lot less movement toward increasing cabana lease fees, which is “a little bit disgusting,” Ferla said.
There’s no specific proposal on how long a cabana term limit would actually last, and whether something even more radical — a lottery system — could also work. There’s no more room on the beach to simply add cabanas, town officials say. Access to renting cabanas is limited to residents and people who own at least $800 in property in town. They’re like rent-controlled apartments, “like a bad Seinfeld episode,” said Councilman Patrick Murray.
“I’ve been squawking about that since 2014,” Murray said. “The only way you can get one is if you’re making inquiries at the local funeral.”
Gail Scowcroft is one of the lucky few. But she waited a long time for her cabana: 37 years.
She put her name on the list sometime in the late 1970s. After having already waited more than a decade, her record of being on the waitlist was lost in a digital transition, Scowcroft said. So she had to go to the end again. She’s had it for maybe 10 years.
On the issue of term limits, she’s open to compromise: Let the people who waited a long time keep them for as long as they wish, and then apply term limits to anyone new who comes on.
“You can’t just wholesale put term limits on people that have waited 20 and 30 years for cabanas,” Scowcroft said.
Scowcroft is no fan of the current town council leadership, especially Pugh. Even outside the context of cabanas — Scowcroft for one sees any focus on them as missing the larger issue — she and her allies have been organizing in opposition to people who want more open access to non-residents when the town really ought to think about whom it serves.
“This particular council may want to push for change. And (then) the tide turns,” Scowcroft said, adding later: “Let’s put it this way, we need a council that supports the beach, and supports the residents of our town.”