The Charlestown Town Council voted Tuesday night to reject a proposed ordinance change that would have extended the period each summer season when people are prohibited from driving vehicles on the beach in the town.
The 3-2 vote followed about two-and-half hours of public comment replete with historical references, impassioned calls for conservation as well public access to the beach, and accusations of ulterior motives by familiar players trying to block off a sought-after “slice of heaven” along Rhode Island’s shore.
“It seemed a much more straightforward decision to me prior to this evening,” Councilor Susan Cooper said, adding that members of the public had “elucidated” the complexity of the situation.
‘This beach has suffered enough’
The night of lengthy and at times testy public comments that eventually led the council to extend its meeting past 10 p.m. began with Deming Sherman, a Shelter Harbor resident and member of Nope’s Island Conservation Association, a non-profit that owns property on the Westerly and Charlestown sides of the Quonochontaug Barrier Beach.
As Sherman and others in his camp see it, the 1.7-mile barrier beach is besieged by the threat of “vehicular abuse.” Nope’s Island maintains that some visitors are irresponsibly taking four wheel drive vehicles over dunes, dune grass and beach face, and threatening birds.
Sherman spoke in support of the proposed ordinance change, which would extend the Charlestown ban on beach driving in town from May 1 to the Saturday after Labor Day, consistent with the town of Westerly’s rules.
“It is about preserving a beautiful, fragile asset,” Sherman said.
“This beach has suffered enough over the years due to reckless actions of a minority of drivers who break the law,” said Mark Brunault, a Nope’s Island trustee. “Conforming the dates of the two town ordinances will facilitate enforcement of the rules and the respective town authorities. Action is badly needed.”
Shoreline access advocates and people who use the area to fish recreationally say the problem is being grossly overstated by people whose true objective is to prevent members of the public from enjoying the barrier beach, a stretch of undeveloped shore that’s at the center of multiple access-related legal disputes.
Charlestown Town Councilor Peter Slom said it was unclear to him how extending a ban a few weeks could solve the apparent scourge of irresponsible drivers on the Quonochontaug Barrier Beach.
“What difference does it make that we take away one month of access to Charlestown residents?” Slom said. “Why not just take it all or give it all?”
Opponents say the change could make it more difficult for elderly people and people with disabilities to access the area. Speaker Nadine Davidson said her husband, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, would be negatively affected by an ordinance change.
“He’s not here because he can’t last 15 minutes to half an hour sitting – he’s in that much pain,” she said. “So if you pass this regulation … that means he’s going to have a little less time, a month’s time, of not being able to have access to the beachfront.”
Others said significant physical changes to the barrier beach are due to natural causes.
“It is the effect of these forces which are not in our control that have impacted Quonnie, not the effect of vehicular passage by responsible anglers and other members of the public,” said Margaret Wilford, president of Rhode Island Mobile Sportfishermen, or RIMS, which owns land on the Charlestown side of the barrier beach and opposed the proposed ordinance change.
(In a 2021 interview with The Public’s Radio for a series on the barrier beach, Eastern Connecticut State University Professor Bryan Oakley, a scientist who has studied the Quonochontaug Barrier Beach, said he did not see anything particularly risky about driving vehicles on the beach, so long as it was done in the right areas. “Driving on the beach itself probably doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot for impacting shoreline change,” Oakley said. “You don’t want people off-roading on the dunes, because once you kill the beach grass there, it takes a long time to come back … But driving on areas that aren’t vegetated, to me, isn’t really a huge issue on these barriers.”)
The people who came to the Charlestown Town Council meeting Tuesday night to speak out against the proposed ordinance change also highlighted what they saw as underlying issues with the way the proposal was brought to the council in the first place, and who’s pushing for the change.
‘These people don’t want us out there’
Sherman, an attorney, introduced himself at the beginning of his remarks as former legal counsel to Nope’s Island Conservation Association as well as the Weekapaug Fire District, which has pushed for control of the barrier beach for decades. Access advocates say those connections should give Charlestown Town Council members pause.
The fire district has taken Westerly to court over actions taken by the town that could result in designated public rights-of-way to the barrier beach at two separate locations: Spring Avenue, a blocked off path at the start of the barrier beach, and the Sand Trail, which begins in Westerly, runs down the center of the barrier and goes onto the beach in Charlestown.
Michael Sands, the Nope’s Island president who also spoke in support of the proposed Charlestown ordinance, is a Weekapaug homeowner and former trustee of The Weekapaug Foundation for Conservation, which owns land on the barrier beach and was established with the purpose of preserving land in Weekapaug and “and relieving the financial burdens of the Weekapaug Fire District.”
Nope’s Island, Weekapaug Fire District and the Quonochontaug Beach Conservation Commission, a group that establishes policies on the barrier beach and which the fire district, Nope’s Island and Weekapaug Foundation for Conservation belong to, all list their address as 4 Wawaloam Drive in Weekapaug, the fire district’s offices.
“Nope’s is really a voice of Weekapaug Fire District,” RIMS member Stephen Cersosimo told the town councilors. “These people don’t want us out there [on the Quonochontaug Barrier Beach]. That is a fact … And I think you should open the ordinance so we could go there 365 days a year.”
“You got caught up in a ruse,” shoreline access advocate Dan Davidson said.
Nope’s Island members, including Sherman, deny that the proposed ordinance change is connected to the issue of beach access. But shoreline access advocates persisted on the point.
“We got a lot of rights of way villains in Westerly,” Anthony Palazzolo, Jr., said. “No one has been more successful in advocating against shoreline access than Deming Sherman … You’re in the presence of greatness tonight.”
An ‘oligarch’s dream’
Palazzolo, an attorney who practices law in Connecticut but not Rhode Island, tried to connect the proposal before the town council to the larger fight for shoreline access and the Sand Trail case currently before the CRMC and in state Superior Court. According to Palazzolo, the language in an updated ordinance could eventually be used by private interests to say that Charlestown doesn’t acknowledge public access the full distance to state land at the Quonochontaug Breachway.
“This is a litigious oligarch’s dream,” Palazzolo said. “You’re going to find yourself in a lawsuit with these people.”
Towards the end of the discussion, one town councilor who strongly opposed the proposed ordinance change, Richard “Rippy” Serra, said he has now been on the receiving end of actions by the Weekapaug Fire District’s legal team regarding access to the barrier beach.
“I was subpoenaed by Locke Lord and was deposed,” Serra said. “And I also received from Locke Lord a threatening letter that, if I did not back down, then I would be personally sued. So if you think these people aren’t playing for keeps, you’re sadly mistaken.”
