The Town Manager’s website asserted April 14  that Kennebunkport has labored to settle the litigation between the beachfront owners and the town, and that unfortunately the owners have steadfastly refused to listen.

While we do not agree with this characterization, we share the town’s desire to come up with a solution for how beachfront property owners, the town and the public all share the beach.

Last July, plaintiffs met town officials and proposed in writing for the second time withdrawing the suit when the town agrees to: (1) maintain public signage indicating the locations of the public beach and the private beach, informing visitors what uses of the private beach are legally allowed or otherwise permitted by the owners; (2) provide owners with the same trespass protection available to all property owners in Kennebunkport; (3) limit beach parking to no more spaces than is currently available today for visitors to the beach and (4) scale back by some suitable policy the building or expansion of multiplex seasonal hotels, motels, mobile home parks and campgrounds in the free enterprise zone and in the Goose Rocks Beach zone.

Satisfying these conditions erases the cause of the litigation, namely, the town’s recent policy of denying that owners have any right to post or restrict to any degree public recreational use of their property.

In reply to other claims frequently made by the town, the plaintiffs make the following points:

 1. Plaintiffs will not close the beach, or prohibit public walking the beach, thereby ‘privatizing’ the beach. The public beach at Goose Rocks Beach is 3.3 football fields long and cannot be closed. It is held in trust for that purpose.

The remaining beachfront is already private and so cannot be privatized. To assert that it is being privatized would be to presuppose that it is public, and it is not, as the Court will declare under Maine law. Nobody is seeking to close the public beach or prohibit walking the private beach.

2. Plaintiffs represent ownership of approximately one-third of the beachfront homes. The remaining beachfront owners have, for varying reasons, not become clients. Presently, however, none of the beachfront owners have expressed a wish to close the beach, to “privatize the public beach” or to prohibit walking any part of the beach. But they fear seeing their rights as owners arbitrarily stripped from them by a frivolous decree of selectmen.

3. Plaintiffs are not asking the court for the “right” to choose who will recreate on the beach. Maine law and plaintiff’s deeds will demonstrate that they already have that right, originating from colonial times and upheld repeatedly for more than 350 years of Maine law. They are asking the court to reaffirm that right which was fully in effect before the town’s adversarial claim against the owners.

4. Plaintiffs have not refused to discuss the proposals suggested by the town because the town has made no proposals except to ‘discuss’ irrelevant issues. Nor do plaintiffs insist that the public use of Goose Rocks Beach be severely restricted. As a matter of fact, the town has steadfastly refused to discuss plaintiffs’ conditions for stopping litigation.

Robert Almeder and Jack Fleming

Representatives for the Goose Rocks Beach plaintiffs