Parking lots at Connecticut state parks reach capacity several weekends every summer, but people still flow onto the state’s beaches, trails and picnic areas.
In some places, specifically Squantz Pond in New Fairfield, and Rocky Neck State Park in Niantic, state officials said that leads to safety risks and they want to stop people from walking into full parks.
State officials said they don’t expect such a rule to come into play more than a few times every season, specifically on busy holiday weekends like Fourth of July, Memorial Day and Labor Day.
“It was driven by the safety concern that we’ve set a vehicle parking capacity at our parks and that’s the safe number of people to have in the park, to have a tool to stop the influx of people at that number,” Tom Tyler, director of Connecticut State Parks, said.
The proposal, which is open for public comment until Oct. 7, would shut off access to anyone who wants to walk-in at a state park but did not park in the lot because it was full. In the case of Rocky Neck, there is a long walk from the entrance to the beach, but that still raises a concern.
“This is really about dealing with the crowds after we’ve reached parking capacity and vehicles looking to park in the neighborhood and parking,” Tyler said.
Steve Carpenteri’s family has owned the Lyme Tavern for more than 40 years and he acquired the adjacent Rocky Neck Inn and Suites seven years ago. He sells up to 70 spots on his property for people to use and then walk into the park when the primary parking lot has reached capacity.
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He said the proposed restriction certainly won’t help business.
“Well it hurts a little bit. Some of the people come in here and they’ll have dinner. Some people just park and then go home,” Carpenteri said.
Tyler said the facilities can only handle certain numbers of cars and people and they need to have some kind of restriction or policy reflecting that.
“We have established a parking capacity for each of our parks that’s based on really the carrying capacity of the parks, the size of the beach, the size of the park, those kinds of issues related to the parks so that when we hit that parking capacity for the day we really can’t go above that number,” Tyler said.
