Examining the Arguments in the Rye Town Park Debate

With the deadline looming for decision-making action, many Rye residents have spoken out once again, more forcefully this time, about the need for change at Rye Town Park (RTP) before the season opens at the end of April.

And the Rye Town Park Commission—which includes Rye Town Supervisor and Commission president Joseph Carvin, Rye Mayor Douglas French, Port Chester Mayor Dennis Pilla, Rye Brook Mayor Joan Feinstein, and Commissioners Joseph Sack and Benedict Salanitro—has listened yet again, most recently at Tuesday night's meeting at Rye Neck High School.

Decisions on proposed changes are pending depending on expert analysis of the options offered by the Rye Town Park Task Force, a group of Rye residents who recently issued recommendations for improvements at the park.

The task force has been saying, for around a year or so now, that it is time for a constructive change for the better for Rye Town Park so it can once again become a seasonal "Park, Not a Parking Lot," as the task force puts it.

Those changes revolve around differential pricing favoring area residents over non-residents (by, among other things, virtually doubling the non-resident weekend and holiday parking/beach admission fees for non-residents along the lines of the so-called Greenwich model), reducing the number of parking spaces on the park's lawn by approximately 50%, from 916 to 491, and addressing safety, environmental and ecological concerns.

However, there was also dissenting opinion about most of those changes –that dissenting voice expressed by John Ambrose, owner of the Seaside Johnnies restaurant that fronts the park at Oakland Beach, who has gotten his lawyer, Jonathan Kraut, to argue that changing the price structure and decreasing the parking would adversely impact his business and possibly affect his lease.

Ambrose and Kraut spoke up towards the end of the meeting, emerging as the sole dissenters to change when discussion was opened up to the public.

Others supporting the proposed changes ranged from Rye's Linda Wells, the Vice President of the Friends of Rye Town Park--who said "hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars" contributed by the Friends to beautify the park would go down the drain unless lawn parking is reduced--to Arlene Leiter, a Harvard-trained, retired Rye businesswomen who also urged the changes as keeping with what other peer beaches have done, based on her own studies which expanded on what previous studies by the Task Force has already shown.

Wells said Friends of Rye Town Park has made a significant financial investment going back around 20 years to beautify the park and make it environmentally and ecologically safe, as well as people and wildlife-friendly.

But all those contributions are being jeopardized by all the parking on the lawn which, Wells said, damaged the trees, grass, lawn, pond and wildlife, contributed to pollution, and was a safety hazard. So she urged the Commission to reduce the parking and up the pricing along the lines suggested by the task force.

Leiter said, that based on her own research, which expanded on similar task force studies, that Croton-on-Hudson only has permits for residents, with non-residents put on a waiting list for preferred parking permits.

Rules and regulations for The Town of Greenburgh, she said, state park areas are only open to residents of the unincorporated area of the town and their guests. Darien and Greenwich also have similar rules that favor differential pricing.

She recommended tightening the rules for obtaining resident permits, advocated having permits that could be applied to vehicles in a way that would make them easily readable, and pointed out that there is no parking on the grass in Central Park in New York City. The only parking for that park is in garages on streets surrounding the park with public transportation the preferred way of getting there, she said.

"Hopefully, seeing that other parks do not allow parking on their grass and do use buses and other transportation methods for people to make use of local parks should help make a case for never allowing cars on grassy areas," she said.

"Having people apply for season permits and tightening up the application procedure would allow for an accurate count and also provide income up front. And there's nothing that says you have to provide parking for Rye Town Park, only access to the lawn and beach," she said.

The cons were summed up by Kraut, lawyer for Seaside Johnnies restaurant and its owner, John Ambrose.

Kraut said business was down 25 percent at the restaurant last year, and any increase in the parking, permit and beach admission fees would almost certainly hurt business this year as well when the park reopens around the end of April.

Ambrose agreed with that assessment and called for a return to the voucher system that would allow his restaurant patrons discounted parking with those vouchers, in turn, purchased by Seaside Johnnies from the park, albeit at a discount.

However, neither Ambrose nor his lawyer mentioned that his business would be expanding because Starfish Grille, the group that owns Seaside Johnnies, is also in the process of opening another, more upscale, seafood restaurant at the other end of the boardwalk, near the Playland pier.

That new restaurant move has led to e-mailed comments on the task force web site ranging from "They're giving over the park to Seaside Johnnies" to "has anybody checked to see if the RTP is getting a fair share of the profits to maintain what is a fast crumbling infrastructure considering the income potential of Seasides" which "brings a lot of non-beach traffic to the park."

Kraut also alluded to the possible perception of an elitist "not in my backyard, not across the street from my house" Rye Town Park attitude (a thinly-veiled verbal nudge at Caroline Walker, one of the task force's leaders, who lives across the street from the park).

In comments afterwards, Ms. Walker said the task force had received around 100 e-mails supporting the proposed changes, with several identifying near accidents involving cars parked on the park's lawn.

"The child of one of my closest friends was almost killed," she said. "Safety, sustainability and the environment are very real issues, not elitist."

 The Commission has copies of all the Task Force data, including those e-mails. The three mayors on the Commission –French, Feinstein and Pilla, along with Carvin –all seem to be in favor of the differential pricing and reduced parking.

The commission has scheduled a "Community Conversation" for Saturday, April 17, at 10 a.m. at Rye Town Park, so it can explain its decision-making process and get further input from the community before its next meeting on April 20 at 10 Pearl Street, Port Chester.

Stay tuned.