Coastal Services welcomes letters to the editor. All letters should carry the writer's address, and a daytime telephone number. All letters are subject to editing for length, clarity, and libel. Pen names are not allowed, and anonymous letters will not be published. Letters should be sent to Coastal Services Editor, NOAA Coastal Services Center, 2234 South Hobson Ave., Charleston, SC 29405-2413, or via e-mail to Hanna.Goss@noaa.gov.
I read "Private Docks: Fighting for the Public's Rights in New York" [November/December 2001 edition]. Docks deprive the public of its established rights to the coast, which belongs to all of us. (I noted the seemingly illegal fencing that extended well out beyond the dock and into the water in the photograph of South Carolina docks on Page 6.) Even in Massachusetts, where the Colonial Ordinances of 1641-1647 extended private ownership to the low water line to allow docks to encourage commerce without the government having to pay for them, that unprecedented Legislative gift of property rights was made explicitly subject to the continuation of the rights of the public below high water.
The public easement for fishing and navigating is like the public easement in roads-and no private abutter would seriously argue that they had a right to block the public easement in a road. When we put public coastal access rights on the same footing as public easements in roads, suits alleging a "right" to a use that denies the public its rights will cease to be taken seriously.
Irene Del Bono
Natick, Massachusetts
Ms. Del Bono is former Massachusetts assistant attorney general specializing in public property law; and she is a member of the Massachusetts Coastal Access Legal and Mediation Services program and a member of the Town of Natick Open Space Committee. The opinions expressed herein are those of the writer, and are independent of and do not reflect the views of any of the groups to which she belongs.
