Glencoe Steps Up Enforcement at Dell Beach

The air was balmy in the twilight as I stepped down toward Dell Beach. A bat flapped overhead and an empty police car was parked on the street at the top of the hill.

I trammeled down the path through a wooded ravine and then climbed down rocks to the sand. When I got to the beach--against the access rules--a couple was on the sand nearby with a corked bottle of red wine, their romantic evening on the beach at sunset interrupted.

“I used to come down here every single day back in high school,” said the male beachgoer, a 21-year-old from Northfield who would not give his name.

“It's different than the public beaches,” said his female companion. “It's off the track.”

The couple quickly skipped up the hill after the wine was dumped on the sand.

Dell Place Beach, a small public swath of land that has long been a refuge for teenagers and young adults on the North Shore, has come under criticism from neighboring property owners fed up with the noise and trash that flow onto their private beaches.

“I've been woken up two to three times a night,” said a man whose house is just south of the trail to Dell Beach. He said one time he looked out his window to see a girl urinating on the trail.

“I grew up in Glencoe. I went there as a kid,” said one of his neighbors while he walked his dog. “It used to be a nice beach. It's not anymore.”

Read More:  from the July meeting of the Board of Trustees.

For now, the beach is legally open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and is routinely used by teenagers from Glencoe as well as other communities. The Glencoe Board of Trustees will decide whether to close the beach or make changes at one of its next two monthly meetings.

At the last trustees meeting, lakefront property owners said that “98 percent” of beachgoers were from outside Glencoe. But an informal head count that I made one afternoon showed 9 of the 13 people along the beach were from Glencoe.

“We've been going here since we were young,” said Chris Val Vassori, a 16-year-old from Glencoe. “They can't shut this down.”

“Glencoe Beach is a lot bigger and you have to pay,” said his friend, David Laser, another 16-year-old from Glencoe. “You don't always have money to pay.”

Laser suggested the trash problem could be solved if a trash can was placed along the beach. The village does have a waste bin at the top of the hill.

“We understand why people get frustrated,” Val Vassori said.

Gary Edidin, who lives on the first block of Dell Place, told the trustees earlier this month that he hoped for tighter regulation of the beach, including possibly fencing it off.

“There is a chronic misuse of the beach,” Edidin told me. “The beach is a relatively difficult area to use and clean up.”

He wants the village to start charging fees like at Glencoe's other beach, where a day pass costs $9 for nonresidents. Alternatively, he suggested parking be controlled along the nearby street.

Edidin also echoed the complaints of his neighbors about the most egregious problems: loud parties at night, public urination and littering on private sections of the beach.

A Glencoe man at the beach with his 16-year-old daughter during a recent afternoon said she had gotten a ticket for trespassing the previous afternoon. The teen's father said she came out of the water a few yards on the private side of the line, and a public safety officer was waiting for her.

The no trespassing signs are not visible from the water, he noted.

“There were no warnings issued,” the father said. “Usually police are good about giving out warnings.”

Deputy Chief Al Kebby disputed the father's account, saying everyone who had been trespassing that day was ticketed. “That's our strategy — zero tolerance,” he said.

Kebby said that ticketing on Glencoe's beaches was at nearly the same level as last year, and disputed a notion by Edidin that enforcement had been lax in past years.* He said Glencoe Public Safety has handed out 55 tickets since May through July 26, as enforcement at the beach has been heighten.

“We're probably down there six or seven times a day,” Kebby added.

Public Safety Chief Mike Volling said that many of the beach checks recently have been performed by on-call volunteer firefighters, reducing the work of the sworn officers.

"We tried to see if we could beef up enforcement and get the kids to follow the rules," Volling said.

He said the stepped-up enforcement has paid off: No tickets were issued in the 10 days after July 26.

Johnny Sileck, a Wheeling resident who was swimming at the beach one afternoon, he said he had been ticketed twice for $75 over the past few months. One time he was caught drinking alcohol and the second time he was caught at the beach at 2 a.m.

Sileck said he was following beach rules now, but the Dell Place Beach continued to be the only beach he traveled for a swim.

“You don't have to pay,” he said. “It's 90 percent of the reason we come here.”

* Aug. 10 9:30 a.m. Correction: The phrase "in past years" was added to the sentence.