Call it Sea Gate-gate!
Residents of the gated seaside community’s north shore are demanding the city clean their beaches. A majority of the peninsular nabe’s shore is privately owned, but the city acquired the north shore through a decades-long series of foreclosures, and now it must give homeowners a chance to buy their beaches back — or send in municipal workers to clean up, locals are demanding.
“It’s an absolute mess, there’s trash all over the place and no one comes to clean up,” homeowner Jeremy Coplan said. “It’s filthy, there’s syringes, broken glass — it’s a liability, and they should do something about it.”
Homeowners once had claim to the land between their homes and the water, but the city foreclosed on much of it between 1967 and 1991, because property owners failed to pay taxes, according to a representative from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which has jurisdiction over city-owned portions of the beach.
Landowners had two years to petition to get their beaches back, but that window is long closed. When the city first took the beaches, they were miniscule — perhaps the length of a subway car, historical photos show. But tides deposited sand on the north shore over time, according to a Army Corps of Engineers study, and the beaches now average the length of a football field from dune to drink — big enough to attract visitors from outside the gated community.
But neither the city nor the neighborhood’s private police force provide security, so outsiders can easily trespass and litter without reprisal, Coplan said.
So much waste had accumulated on the beach by 2008 that area residents and volunteers with the American Littoral Society pulled 50–60 full-size bags of refuse off the roughly two-block-long coastline, according to Patrick Fioriglio, who lives next to Coplan.
If the city transferred the beach back to locals, they could truly take ownership over the orphaned coast, he said.
“We could get the entire block to own their properties again, and then we can discuss what can be done,” Fioriglio said.
And the notion is not a land-grab for Coplan or Fioriglio — they each already own swaths of the beach stretching from their homes to the water, because the people who previously owned their houses paid taxes on the beach front, Fioriglio said.
Coplan is even willing to let the public use his private sand if tax dollars could help maintain it.
“At the end of the day, the public are using the beach anyways, and it’s filthy — it’s dangerous for the public to be using this beach,” he said. “I don’t have any problem with people being there, but there’s no trash cans or anything, if they had those facilities, then people would throw away their stuff.”
But Coplan and Fioriglio will have to wait. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services temporarily gave the Department of Parks and Recreation jurisdiction over the coast in late 2013 when the Army Corps of Engineers started to beef up anti-erosion infrastructure on the peninsula.
The Army Corps dredged sand from the north beach to beef up the south beach and finished the project in June. Now the Parks Department is beginning to transfer the land back to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, but the transfer could take “a few months” to complete and the agency does not know what will happen to the property until the transfer is done, according to a spokeswoman.
A representative from the Sea Gate Association — a neighborhood homeowners association that collects dues to clean streets and south shore beaches, and to pay the area’s private police force — requested this paper make all press inquiries via standard mail. As of press time, it has not responded to a letter postmarked in the first week of August.
