Segregation Cited in Village Beach Fray
If you live south of the tracks in the community of Bellport, you can go to the village beach. If you live north of the tracks, you cannot. It is an issue of inequality, said Brookhaven Supervisor Dan Panico, who made it a major concern of his administration.
Appearing at a town hall press conference surrounded by North Bellport residents, Panico detailed his struggle to get their kids to the seashore. Hours-long conversations with Bellport officials about gaining access to Ho Hum Beach via their ferry service “went nowhere,” he said. And when the town arranged for a water taxi to bring families across Bellport Bay to the Fire Island oasis, the village ticketed the operator.
A Bellport trustee clogging up the town’s reservation system using fake names, including the distasteful “Mike Hunt,” was the last straw for the supervisor. He engaged legal counsel—former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Brookhaven Supervisor Mark Lesko—to “defend the rights of the people and pursue all legal options to ensure that residents have access to Ho Hum Beach.”
According to Panico, the town owns the bay bottom where the Bellport ferry docks and lets the village use it under a 2018 town board resolution, which states that the “continued use and benefit of the subject property, known as Ho Hum Beach, for the residents of the Town of Brookhaven is assured.”
“It's wrong for Bellport Village to use a municipal-owned beach as a private beach and deny access to all local residents to waterways to the beach,” said NAACP chapter president Georgette Grier-Key. “Bellport Village is actively practicing segregation by excluding access and public accommodation to the Brookhaven Town-deeded Ho Hum beach by not allowing the local and surrounding community that are African American and BIPOC people to use the beach.”
While the Atlantic getaway falls under the jurisdiction of the Fire Island National Seashore, Bellport Mayor Maureen Veitch points out that village taxpayers fund the dock, ferry service, bathrooms, water well, maintenance, and a concession stand, as well as pay $80,000 per year to the town to provide lifeguards. “We’re not getting anything for free,” she said.
Referring to a meeting with town officials, the mayor stated: “I told them we would definitely like to work together, talk about a particular group they want to have as a guest on the ferry. I suggested a youth group, a team, a church group that they were working with. We wanted to bring them in a planned way. That’s the truth of the matter.”
Veitch went on to list limited space at the beach and safety concerns as reasons to minimize usage. “If I had a different setup at the marina than I do right now, it's possible we could have a safe landing pad for a commercial operation, but we don't. We think it's unsafe to dock on the sea wall,” the mayor said, noting that she was “blindsided” by the town’s water taxi service. “No one informed the village that this was happening. There were 50 people on paddle boards on Sunday; we have 130 children in a sailing program. They access the water where this commercial ferry is. We have to look at what is actually safe for the people.”
Veitch stressed it would be faster and more cost-effective to run a jitney from Bellport to other beaches, such as Smith Point. “That would take literally 18 minutes versus what he's doing with my taxpayer money. He’s taking people by jitney to a dock onto a boat. It takes them 40 minutes to get there. So you'd have to wonder what's really behind this.”
One family that took advantage of the town’s water taxi was Theresa Yanni of Bellport, her two kids, and her mother, who said she was hesitant about making the trip given the controversy. “It’s disturbing to us,” Yanni stated. “We almost didn’t want to come, but luckily, we had no problems. I don’t see the harm in sharing the beach.”
Attending Panico’s press conference with a group of residents holding signs reading “Free the Beach,” local business owner Ghulam Sarwar said, “There should only be one Bellport. This is totally wrong and unacceptable. Everyone has the right to go to the beach.” Resident Elishamah Risien pointed out that his community has to put up with the town landfill. “They should at least let us go to the beach,” he said.
“This is a political stunt; there is no other motivation behind it,” said a village resident at Ho Hum Beach who declined to give his name. “How is it okay to drop people off at a beach with very few services?”
“We’re not looking to overrun the Village of Bellport,” said Panico, who led with the issue when he gave his inaugural speech in January. “We’re not looking to invade the village. We simply ask for a handful of dates for a program for the people of North Bellport to go over to enjoy the beauty of Long Island.”
“I'm an optimistic person, and I believe that things can be worked out through conversation,” Mayor Veitch concluded.