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Town looks to crack down on night fishing, camping, open fires on area beaches

SoutholdLOCAL photo by Lisa Finn.

Tired of seeing their beaches trashed by fishermen, campers, and large, partying groups who light bonfires and leave the sand littered with debris, Southold Town residents have called upon the town board for help.

With the summer season in full swing, tranquil early mornings often find Southold’s normally pristine beaches littered with bottles and other trash, Southold Town Supervisor Scott Russell said at today’s town board work session.

“There’s an overuse of beaches throughout the town on a regular basis, especially at night,” Russell said. While in the past the town has had some success in dealing with the issue, it’s once again become a source of contention for residents, he said.

While Russell said the town wants to honor the public trust doctrine, which allows the public to traverse the section of beach from the shore to high tide line, despite private property ownership, he said in certain cases, individuals are moving beyond the water line and onto private property.

“The public trust ensures that the public has the right to traverse the shore below the mean high water mark. What exactly ‘traverse’ means is subject to historic debate,” Russell said. “It’s not entirely clear that you can cook, fish, and camp just because you are below the high water mark.” The supervisor added that the “mean high water mark” is the mean high tide over 14.1 years. “Where that line is, is anyone’s guess,” he said. “Yet another historic legal dispute.”

The complaints being called in to the Southold Police department have become “cumbersome” for a force already handling many summer calls, the supervisor said; there’s a need for solutions, he added. Calls are coming in repeatedly on weekends and at numerous locations across the miles of beaches in town, Russell said.

“These folks are getting more brazen,” Councilman Bob Ghosio added.

Russell said an added problem is that while parking stickers are required for vehicles, many just walk onto the beach, adding to congestion issues; the beachgoers are “spreading out onto property not owned by the town,” he said.

Justice Louisa Evans said the issue on Fishers Island lies with individuals who stay all night, with no bathroom facilities, and who leave their trash behind.

The situation is the same in Southold Town, Russell said, but the problem is that people aren’t littering until they leave, and it’s difficult to enforce any sort of restrictions.

“They say, ‘We’re not camping, we’re fishing’,” Evans said.

Russell added, “We’re not trying to eliminate the use of beaches, but we need to regulate them. We need to evaluate what the public trust doctrine stands for. What do you do with a town that has so many miles of beaches and limited resources to address this?”

Councilman Bill Ruland suggested the board look at how other towns handle the issue.

While the public trust doctrine does say anyone can traverse the beach up to the high water mark, “It doesn’t say you can set up camp,” Ghosio said.

Part of the problem, Ghosio said, is that the access points in areas such as Southampton and Riverhead are easier in terms of enforcement, with officials able to drive onto the beach. “Here you have cliffs. It’s harder for police.”

Ruland said the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has a responsibility to help the town and enforce regulations regarding fishing and if they do not adhere, it might be time to go to state legislators.

Russell said the DEC handles resource management.

“If you leave a boatload of dirty diapers on the beach, they should be writing a ticket. It shouldn’t all fall on the town,” Ruland said.

The supervisor said the calls he’s been receiving from neighbors say they understand and respect the public trust doctrine. “But this goes way beyond that,” Russell said.

The board directed Town Attorney Bill Duffy to investigate how similar situations are handled in other towns and said they would revisit the discussion.

Later, at tonight’s town board meeting, Linda Goldsmith, former commissioner of the Orient-East Marion Park District, spoke to the issue and said people are “refusing to leave” Truman’s Beach and instead, congregating near the state’s launching ramp until later in the evening, when they migrate down the beach for night fishing.

“We get a lot of discontent from neighbors to the east,” she said. “There’s a lot of debris, glassine envelopes, hooks.” Once when she was a park district commissioner, a fire broke out on the beach.

Goldsmith said new signage would help, instructing visitors that there is no camping, no overnight stays, and no fires, and that the beach closes at dusk.

She said she understood that people can walk below the high water mark, “but you can’t walk across our property to get to it.”

Goldsmith said the Southold Police and local DEC rep have all been polite and responsive, but said new signs in two languages, would help.

Russell said there would be a coordinated effort to address the problem between the town board, police chief, DEC, and park district.

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