The Halifax Board of Selectmen voted unanimously July 14 to keep the Lingan St. / 4th Ave. resident-access boat ramp gated through Monday, Sept. 7, extending a four-day July Fourth closure into a full summer-long shutdown after residents described jet ski traffic, drinking, and near misses in the swim area at the town beach on West Monponsett Lake. In a second unanimous vote, the board directed Town Administrator Steven Solbo to price out a land survey and a title search — because after two meetings of debate, no one at the table could say with certainty whether the town owns the beach it is trying to regulate.
The beach discussion, listed on the agenda as a Parks Commission item, consumed roughly 45 minutes of the meeting and drew a contingent of residents from the 4th Ave., neighborhood. It was the second time in a month the issue commanded the board’s agenda: on June 23, residents brought photographs and video to the board describing jet skis operating inside the no-wake buoys, alcohol on the beach, blocked emergency access, and a rear-end collision involving a vehicle towing a jet ski trailer. Chair Thomas Pratt cautioned at that meeting against assuming the conduct was confined to non-residents, telling the room the rules should be enforced the same way regardless of where a person lives.
Following that meeting, the town installed a temporary gate at the ramp for the Thursday-through-Sunday stretch of the July Fourth weekend. By Tuesday, residents were nearly unanimous that it had worked — and that removing it had immediate consequences.
Parks Commission Chair Michael Schleiff opened by conceding the season had gotten away from the three-member elected board. “It was a mess,” Schleiff said. “Everybody knows it. Everything fell apart. Nothing worked.” He said the commission had put the same measures in place as prior years — a paid parking attendant, swim buoys, markers, a portable toilet, post-storm cleanup — and that a surge of visitors overwhelmed all of it.
Schleiff said he is effectively operating alone. He told the board he has been unable to convene the commission’s other two members, that the commission last met around the time of the annual town meeting, and that he has been hauling trash from the beach in his own truck. He said the commission returned roughly $2,000 in unspent funds to the town at the close of the fiscal year because it lacked the staffing to expend it, and that money for police details at the beach was exhausted before the holiday weekend. “We try it every year,” he said. “Every year we try to get ahead of it. We never get ahead of it. Ever.” He later added: “I’m frustrated through the roof. And the breakdown is like everywhere.”
Pratt pressed him on the commission’s meeting schedule. “If we’re a day late and a dollar short, like you’re not meeting regularly, that only exacerbates the problem in my opinion,” the chair said. Member Jonathan Selig suggested a standing monthly meeting and offered administrative help from the Selectmen’s office to reach the other commissioners, while cautioning that the Parks Commission is separately elected and outside the board’s appointing authority — a jurisdictional limit Pratt returned to repeatedly through the meeting.
Residents were pointed. Steve Goodman of 4th Avenue disputed Schleiff’s account of coverage at the beach and said the temporary gate had changed behavior almost immediately, with vehicles turning around rather than launching. He said the effect reversed within a day of the gate coming down, and that vehicles now scout the ramp for enforcement before larger groups arrive. Goodman also told the board he intends to file a complaint with the Attorney General’s office over the Parks Commission’s failure to produce meeting minutes in response to a public records request, saying the commission had more than six weeks to respond.
David Mascio of 4th Avenue thanked Pratt, Selig and Deputy Police Chief Theodore Benner for visiting the site, but said he emailed the Parks Commission the prior week and received no reply from any commissioner. “If a Parks Commissioner doesn’t want to be involved, step down and put a talent bank form in,” Mascio said. He argued that enforcement at the beach in recent months has come primarily from residents working with police, and pointed to a fatal jet ski crash in Lakeville as the outcome the neighborhood is trying to avoid. “If parks can’t handle it, let’s get some people in there that can.”
Amy Troup of Hillside Avenue told the board the gate had restored ordinary use of the beach, describing families walking children down to the water on weekday evenings. She said signage at the beach has long designated it for Halifax residents and that neighbors filed a petition with the town clerk’s office in 2020 seeking to bar non-resident access.
Benner raised the practical obstacles. The deputy chief said the town does not know where 4th Avenue ends as a public way and where park land begins — a distinction that matters, because a gate blocking a public way would not survive legal challenge. The existing temporary gate sits far enough down that he believes it is defensible; moving it uphill, he said, would require settling the public-way question and would push turnarounds into residents’ driveways. Benner said officers have written approximately 40 citations at the beach this year totaling roughly $1,900, but that enforcement does not hold. “They’ll go down there. They’ll tag 10 of the vehicles. As soon as they leave, 10 more vehicles do show up,” he said. He suggested relocating the parking attendant to the entrance to check stickers on the way in rather than patrolling after the fact.
That prompted the ownership question. Goodman told the board he has been running his own title search at the Registry of Deeds and has traced the parcels from the 1860s through 1930 without finding a conveyance to the town. He described a private school property bequeathed in 1911, passed in the 1930s to two owners who split the land and donated the school building to the town, with the remaining lots running down to the beach still privately held as of 1956. Solbo noted that a survey and a title search are separate exercises and that both would need to go out to bid, though some firms perform both. Mark Dillon of Lingan St. said he believes the Parks Commission already commissioned a survey of the area roughly two years ago under a state planning grant, and that the record may still exist.
Selig moved to have Solbo research pricing for both a land survey of the gate area and a title search to establish ownership of the beach parcel. It passed unanimously.
The board also asked Solbo to research whether the beach can lawfully be restricted to residents. Selig framed the concern plainly: the town can restrict parking, but restricting a public area is a different legal question. “If we built HOPS and said it was for Halifax kids only — how do you make a beach resident only if it truly is a public area?” he asked. Margaret McKenna of Lingan St. described how the nearby private Liberty Beach handles the issue, with guests permitted only when accompanied by the resident who brought them. Pratt said he supports the goal but wants the legal footing settled first. “I’m not against it. I just want to make sure we do it right the first time,” he said. “I don’t want to put it forward and then have to take it back because we were not right or not accurate.”
Dillon offered a note of caution against a blanket ban, saying the neighborhood also lost visiting families from East Bridgewater and Kingston who used the beach without incident, and that access through the ramp — not the beach itself — is what draws the problem traffic. He also noted the ramp runs through a freshwater mussel bed, a protected species in Massachusetts that helps filter the pond.
Selig then moved to extend the temporary gate through Sept. 7, with the board free to revisit it earlier if circumstances change. It carried 3-0. The town posted formal notice of the closure on July 18, directing residents to the state boat ramp on Route 58 for the duration.