YORK, Maine — Dave Dewey always assumed that the beach he walks his dog on every morning was public.
Due to a colonial quirk, Long Sands Beach has always been privately owned. Since 1937, it has been owned by the Norton family, which has never restricted access but decided to sell it in recent years after the death of a patriarch. After negotiations with the town, voters narrowly decided to pay the family $4 million for it.
The purchase has led to thorny questions about what value the property that mostly consists of intertidal land has. The decision by 53 percent of York voters to fork over the money also comes months before Maine’s highest court is expected to rule in a landmark case that could grant automatic public access to all of the state’s beaches.
“I think it was pretty stupid,” Dewey, a 15-year resident of Cape Neddick who voted against purchasing the beach, said while walking Wednesday. “It’s privately owned, but all these beaches are being used by everyone. How are the Nortons going to keep the public off the beach?”
Only one of York’s four beaches is owned by the town. Around 60 percent of Maine’s coastline is privately owned, according to a 2007 study by the Island Institute. Many of those landowners, like the Nortons, have long let the public access the beach for free.
Not every landowner wants to share. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court is currently mulling a case out of Wells, where homeowners along Moody’s Beach are fighting to keep their parcels private. If the court decides against the homeowners, York voters might have just agreed to fork $4 million over for a piece of land they already had the right to access.
There is already some confusion among residents as to why the town didn’t wait another six months to vote on whether to purchase the beach. Ben Ford, a lawyer arguing against the homeowners in the Supreme Court case, said he expects a decision midway through 2025.
“It seems to me to be premature for any municipality to be buying intertidal land when there’s a pending decision in the Maine Supreme Court that could render that transaction completely valueless,” Ford said.
A couple of York residents walking along Long Sands Wednesday thought that the town should have called the family’s bluff. At high tide, the beach is completely covered by seawater. While the town would probably not have permitted development on the beach, a private buyer could leverage an upland parcel to charge admission, said Peter Joseph, York’s town manager.
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David Silk, one of the lawyers representing a beachfront owner in the pending Supreme Court case, said voters made a wise choice in purchasing the beach.
“This was an opportunity for the town to acquire certainty,” Silk said. “There’s value in certainty.”
Long Sands Beach has lots of inherent value. But its monetary value was a hotly debated point among residents. Some on the beach Wednesday felt that $4 million appeared to be a “bargain,” considering that properties along that stretch can go for millions of dollars.
Yet intertidal land has never been appraised in Maine as having any value, Ford said. When the town of York conducted its own valuation of the beach, it landed on $43,000 because it is vacant and undeveloped.
During years of negotiations with the Nortons, the town commissioned a third-party appraisal that valued the parcel at $4.36 million, taking into account that it is beachfront property in a tourism area. The firm’s analysis noted that there are no sales of similar properties.
Another factor that weighed on residents’ minds when voting this month was the fact that the Norton family has never paid any property taxes on their portion of Long Sands, claiming a handshake deal made in the 1950s with the town as long as the family maintained public access.
That arrangement is out of compliance with Maine’s tax laws. Neither the Norton family nor the town can produce documentation proving the arrangement’s existence. Some York residents were angered to learn of this earlier this year and voted “no” on the question because of it, Joseph said. A few are calling on the town to pursue back taxes.
Sylas Hatch, the Norton family’s representative, added that since 1937 the town has also benefited from the economic impact of beach-related tourism and generated substantial revenue from parking meter fees. York is not looking for that kind of a fight, Joseph said.
“We don’t even want to open up that box and argue one side or the other,” he said.
