Seven Member Long Beach West Task Force Named

A seven-member task force to be chaired by Butternut Lane resident Patrick Gribbon has been named by Mayor John Harkins to address the future options and potential uses of Long Beach West, a narrow strip of barrier beach that extends westward from Lordship along Long Island Sound. 

At the Town Council meeting on Monday, Mayor Harkins said that the task force will answer to the Town Council but will work independently of direct council oversight. 

Indeed, not one of the seven-member Long Beach task force is a Town Council member. 

Gribbon, a Waterfront Harbor Management Commission member, will be joined by fellow Waterfront Commission members Edward Scinto and Devin Jon Santa, as well as Lordship resident Morgan Kaolian, town conservation administrator Brian Carey, the CT Audubon Society’s Milan Bull, and Marcia Stewart, president of Protect Your Environment of Stratford. 

At Wednesday’s regular meeting of the Waterfront Commission, Gribbon noted that the seven members represent various points of view with respect to the controversial barrier beach property owned by the town of Stratford that until recently was home to cottages that were torn down using federal funds. 

Several of the new task force’s members, Carey and Bull, were panelists at a special Long Beach West forum hosted on March 31 by the advocacy group, Protect Your Environment of Stratford, moderated by Stewart. [See related articles.] Mayor Harkins was also a member of that panel. 

For his part, Gribbon said that the task force will not meet in May, but will likely begin its work in June. But before the first meeting convenes, Gribbon said he will meet with the mayor to map out a general outline of what the task force hopes to accomplish, he said. On Tuesday, Gribbon met with the mayor’s executive assistant, Marc Dillon. 

Gribbon added that because it is such a diverse group, he envisions the first few meetings of the task force as opportunities “to get to know each other.” 

“We’re not dealing with town budgets, or hiring or firing of employees,” Gribbon noted, so the proceedings should not be contentious. Every person on the task force wants what is best for the town and its residents, while protecting the environmental integrity of the property and the plant an animal species located there, he said. 

Gribbon also believes that Stratford must begin the process of opening up the dialogue between the town of Stratford and the city of Bridgeport, which owns the more expansive Pleasure Beach parcel adjacent to the narrower Long Beach West barrier beach strip. 

Toward that end, Gribbon said Wednesday that he attended a meeting in Bridgeport earlier this week of the city’s East End and Bridgeport officials and others, who were there to discuss potential uses of adjacent Pleasure Beach. At the Bridgeport meeting, a 60-page document was presented by a Hamden-based consultant detailing Pleasure Beach’s past with an eye toward future redevelopment.

Kaolian, who was a major proponent of Stratford selling the Long Beach West parcel to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, was also present at the Bridgeport meeting. 

But while the option of selling Long Beach West to the feds has apparently gone by the wayside, Gribbon nevertheless believes that the two municipalities must open up a dialogue so that future uses of the adjacent parcels are compatible. “We wouldn’t Bridgeport develop a Six Flags at Pleasure Beach” without Stratford’s input. 

It would be beneficial for both sides to renew a dialogue, Gribbon said, noting that “our piece of land is like a bathtub compared to what they have out there.” 

In the 1940s and 50s, he noted, “there were 60 buildings on the Pleasure Beach parcel … They had a trolley car that you took you back and forth over the island.”

Gribbon said he did take something away from this week’s meeting in Bridgeport that he did not expect. “It’s clear that their efforts are more commercial than anything else … East End residents are interested in jobs,” said Gribbon, and it’s obvious that “they are further along than Stratford” in the planning process thus far. 

They have a detailed study completed by a consultant, and “we are just getting started.”