Sing it with me: Let’s go fly a kite. Louder now! Up to the highest height! That’s the kind of image public land can conjure at its best – a joy for anyone who shows up, regardless of what they earn or where they live. Connecticut has the land for all of this. What it lacks is the will to build it. Instead, the state has developed a habit of acquiring remarkable properties, congratulating itself for saving them from development, and letting them decay into passive parkland – or into nothing at all. Hammonasset Beach, with its campground, nature center, and two miles of beach, generates more revenue for Connecticut’s state park system than any other park in the state. The state just doesn’t act on what it knows. Consider Sunrise Resort in East Haddam, a beloved campground nestled in the “Catskills of Connecticut,” where families swam in the Salmon River and the pool for generations. Purchased by the state in 2009, it sat vacant for years. The riverside cabins were eventually demolished. Just 1.4 miles away, a private operator opened 45 tiny cabins in December 2021 – no river frontage, no restaurant, just cabins and a dog park. Marriott bought that company in 2024. The state had the better property. It tore it down instead. It was the right land to protect. What followed was an abdication. Or consider Seaside Sanatorium in Waterford. The famed Gilded Age architect Cass Gilbert designed the Tudor Revival complex as the country’s first heliotropic hospital for children with tuberculosis (treatment through sunlight and sea air). Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1996, it continues to sit abandoned after closing nearly 30 years ago. Less than ten years ago, the Department of Energy Environmental Protection’s own master plan for Seaside endorsed a destination park – commissioning a feasibility study that concluded a roughly 100-room lodge with a restaurant and spa would attract developers, then issuing a formal Request for Proposals calling Seaside “an attractive” candidate for a hotel. In 2023, the state reversed course and announced it would demolish the historic buildings for passive parkland instead. A lawsuit sought to block it – and while it has since been settled, the buildings still stand (for now). DEEP wrote the playbook for a successful Seaside Park. They just declined to follow it. The state frames this as a choice between buildings and open space. It isn’t. Seaside’s buildings already occupy their footprint. Demolishing them doesn’t add a single acre, but it destroys the reason to visit – reviewer after reviewer cites the buildings, not the shoreline, as Seaside’s draw. At Medfield State Hospital in Massachusetts, a similarly left-for-dead complex, the historic campus is being reimagined rather than razed, with Bellforge Arts Center animating the grounds with concerts, festivals, community events, and trails. A hotel at Seaside with a ground-floor restaurant and public shoreline and grounds access, or an arts venue anchored in those Tudor Revival halls, would do the same. Connecticut keeps treating preservation and public access as competing values. They aren’t. Other states are building the infrastructure Connecticut already has – Alabama just broke ground on a new lodge at Cheaha State Park. Connecticut has Cass Gilbert buildings sitting on Long Island Sound. The state just lacks the vision to use them. Enter Hartford’s Batterson Park – and a rare chance to get this right. It just reopened after a $10 million largely state-funded renovation, and is operated by Riverfront Recapture under a public-private partnership with DEEP. It has trails, picnic areas, a splash pad, and kayak launches. What it doesn’t have is swimming, which is still prohibited due to water quality issues from I-84 runoff that a 2024 state study says could be addressed with long-term stormwater remediation. Meanwhile, 86 acres adjacent to the park, deeded by the City of Hartford to its pension fund in 2017 in lieu of a $5 million cash contribution it couldn’t afford, remain in limbo – a proposed truck stop sale fell through, but the land’s future is unresolved. Should the city look to sell, the state should be first in line, because protecting that land is what makes the long-term vision possible. DEEP’s own master plan for Seaside identified swimming as an undersupplied amenity statewide. Protect the land, fix the water, and build the activated public space that Sunrise and Seaside never became. Batterson could be the crown jewel Ritter described – a place where residents can get in the water on a hot summer day. The state just has to decide to finish what it started. Passive parkland is fine, when it’s the deliberate answer. But it is not the solution to every parcel of open space within our borders. Not everyone wants to go for a stroll. Not every day is right for flying a kite. Some days, you need to get in the water – and not every family has a private pool or a shoreline community. Public swimming is not a luxury. It is exactly the kind of thing the state exists to provide. Connecticut has the land. The gesture of protection, however, cannot become a substitute for the harder work of stewardship. Leah Beckett is a Hartford resident and planner at IMEG, the founder of Herd Supply Co., and co-owner of Beckett Farms. ...read more read less