Hello friend,
I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the way in which Rhode Island “handled” this virus. When people talk about this in the past tense, that makes me very nervous. Because the truth is, even though it feels like forever, our first case in RI was just over four months ago. We’re going to be living with this virus for a year or more, and we’re not even halfway there. If we want to be able to keep people safe, to keep businesses open, to send our kids back to school next month, then we need to stay serious.
In that spirit, I want to talk to you about our state beaches.
Rhode Island has some of the best beaches in the country, and it’s one of my favorite parts about our state. I grew up going to the beach every weekend in the summer, and now I take my family to the beach. Unfortunately, over the last few weeks we’ve seen a big increase in the number of people on some of our state beaches. Last month, even with reduced parking, our state beaches saw almost 50,000 more cars than the same time last year.
As long as everyone is wearing masks in common areas and social distancing, that’s not a problem, but we’re seeing a couple places where that’s not the case. In particular, we’ve seen closely packed crowds and poor mask compliance over the past couple weeks at Misquamicut and Scarborough State Beaches. This puts people at risk.
Last week, I told Rhode Islanders that, if we don’t get beach crowding under control, we’re going to have to shut them down again. Unfortunately, last weekend the situation was even worse at these two beaches. The crowding was the worst we’ve seen it since this crisis began, and that spilled over into crowding at local restaurants and bars.
I’ve been clear from the beginning that the name of the game is flexibility – that we need to be able to adapt our approach and reimpose measures in a targeted way if it becomes necessary. So today I’m announcing that, beginning tomorrow , parking lots at Misquamicut and Scarborough State Beaches will be reduced to 25% capacity. We are dialing back the amount of parking in order to reduce the volume of visitors.
This does not mean you should just park elsewhere and walk on to the beach. We’ll be working with municipalities to crack down on illegal parking in areas around our beaches, and we’ll be ramping up enforcement at local businesses. We’ll also have staff out on the beaches to hand out masks to folks who don’t have them.
This does not mean you should just park elsewhere and walk on to the beach. We’ll be working with municipalities to crack down on illegal parking in areas around our beaches, and we’ll be ramping up enforcement at local businesses. We’ll also have staff out on the beaches to hand out masks to folks who don’t have them.
I want to be transparent: if we start to see these same issues at other beaches, we’ll put restrictions on them too. And if we continue to see issues, we’ll close our state beach parking lots entirely. I hope it doesn’t come to that, and I’m counting on everyone to knock it off.
If you drive to a beach and see that it’s full, turn around. Go to one of our great parks. Go for a walk or a bike ride. If you’re on the beach, set up as far as possible from other people.
-Gina Raimondo
Governor
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