The rights of some of our neighbors has been under assault for several years now as the increase in beach goers has outstripped the supply of parking spaces at the State Park. Local entrepreneurs have taken up the slack by offering day long parking to those who would pay the fee (sometimes less than the Park fee), and the State no longer limits use of parking at the Fort Popham to those who only visit the fort. Without adequate beachfront property to accommodate the influx of customers and the tendency of those customers to wander down the beach onto other peoples property, the problem has become severe for many and has resulted in a dramatic impact on the property owners ability to enjoy or even control their own property. People build fires, drink and generally use other's property with no respect for the owners rights.

Two meetings have been held with town officials in an attempt to address the problem. I did not attend the first of these meetings two years ago, but did attend the one last year.

The town police had given homeowners some guidelines at a meeting with them two years ago, so that they, the police, might effectively cope with the property owners complaints when they were called upon to do so. Property owners (as I understand it and was reiterated at the meeting last year) had been told to post "no trespassing" signs on their property. Then, when police were called because of a trespass, there could be no doubt as to the purposeful trespass that was taking place. Police could then take appropriate action and cause the removal of the offending persons. The meeting last year yielded a much different response. This time (2004) Popham property owners were told by the town selectmen that;

1) the town's people had always enjoyed free and unencumbered use of ALL beachfront property at Popham;

2) the people of the town would continue to enjoy that use;

3) when called, police would not respond to trespass complaints ("they have better things to do");

4) a sign would be posted asking people to respect private property rights at the access points where people were collecting fees for parking ( I am told a sign was up for one day and that it was gone the next day);

5) the town would take no action to dissuade people from coming down to Popham when the park was full by posting signs to that effect.

So basically the property owners at Popham were out of luck in trying to secure any sort of co-operation from the town officials in protecting their property rights. I found the attitude of the selectman to border on arrogance. What was not covered in the town's non-approach to the problem was the fact that the town can not even remotely begin to assert that every person who is using the beach property of others is from the town. The notion that the townspeople as a class of people have all always enjoyed every property owners land and therefore have established a prescriptive right to that use is preposterous and has been tested by the courts. The conscious decision by the town NOT to make any attempt to protect ANY property owner from ANY trespass on private property is, as far as I can see, another example of the town ignoring the rights of the existing property owners at Popham in favor of profit for a few and a supposed benefit to the rest of the town's people at the expense of the private property owner's rights of land owners at Popham. As there are other beach areas which have faced similar problems, one property owner has gotten a summary of the court's actions to date and legal opinion on the matter from the University of Maine Law School and forwarded it to me. It is contained below. There is one very definitive case - Moody Beach - which is now used for reference as the current state of law on this and it involves the "Fishing, fowling, and navigation" laws from colonial days.

NOTE: Click on green links below to retrieve pages from this summary. These are PDF files and will open in separate pages. You can close the individual page and then open the next. This keeps the file size smaller, but you may still experience a slow download on slower connections. I have tried to keep them small but still legible. A couple of them are large because they are either printed over images or they contain graphics which had to be scanned at a high resolution to preserve their detail. If these rights are a concern of yours, I suggest that you print these pages for reference (you can quote them to the police when they say they won't do anything for you) and so you may to look at them all together. Each page will open as separate page. You can then print it or close it to return to this page and retrieve the next page.

Fires on the beach on your-or anyone else's property without a permit?

I have been told that only the owner of a property can get a permit for a fire. This means that renters may not get a permit. If someone does not own the property on which a fire has been built, or the owner has not gotten a permit for the fire, it is illegal.

One property owner calls 911. If Phippsburg is not protecting your property,get someone who will. The county will respond. Eventually they will get the town to take responsibility for its own turf.

I will get a copy of the regulations and post them here.