The Riverhead Town Board will vote next week to prevent nonresidents from obtaining beach parking permits this year, continuing a suspension that started in 2020 in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Board members discussed the subject at their work session Thursday. The board also signaled it would introduce legislation this year to change the town code to permanently remove the nonresident parking permit. A change to the code would require a public hearing.
Councilman Tim Hubbard, the town board’s liaison to the Beach Committee, said the committee “feels very strongly” that the town should not issue nonresidents stickers.
“With the start of COVID we found that people — particularly out west, particularly [from] the city area — were coming out and using our beaches at much higher amounts than they were because their beaches were all closed,” Hubbard said Thursday.
“And what that caused was overcrowding on the beaches and the parking lots. And our residents thought that wasn’t fair that out-of-towners can come use our beaches and there wasn’t room enough for our own residents to use them,” Hubbard said.
The town board suspended beach parking permits for nonresidents by resolution in the summer 2020. Due to COVID closures, 2019 permits were honored until the end of June. The board renewed the nonresident parking policy for last summer.
Parks and Recreation Superintendent Ray Coyne said the town makes around $50,000-$55,000 per year selling nonresident daily and seasonal beach stickers, a number he said was “not significant.”
“I think for that amount of money I feel we are doing a better service to our residents by keeping the beaches closed to out-of-towners,” Hubbard said. “Most towns around us do it the same way. I can’t go out to Southold and use their beaches.”
All five East End towns, with the exception of Southold, offer permits to nonresidents, according to their town websites. Guests of Southold residents can be granted a beach permit through an application filed by a Southold resident.
Hubbard said in a phone interview Friday the Beach Committee could consider a policy like Southold’s.
Neither the suspension nor a permanent code change would affect the code the ability of hotels and motels within the town to obtain permits for their guests to use at town beaches.
“If you are coming out here to stay a week, yes, it’s good that you do use our beach,” Hubbard said, though he said he also believes most people coming to the East End go to beaches along the ocean, rather than on the Long Island Sound.
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