Tensions Swell Over the Price of Parking in Wrightsville Beach

On an evening this spring, every seat in Wrightsville Beach’s town hall was filled with people in blue shirts. Even standing room was limited.

Some attendees were smiling, others were stoic. Some carried handmade signs that read “Community over cash” and “Nature shouldn’t come with a meter.” Others were more provocative: “We know this isn’t really about parking.” 

The group had gathered to present the aldermen with a petition advocating for free parking after 5 p.m. on weekdays. 

Visitors must pay to park everywhere on the tiny island strip of beach from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., March through October. It costs $6 an hour in the town-owned parking lots, or $5 an hour for metered street parking. Earlier this year, the town raised prices for day passes to $30 or $35 depending on where you park, a $5 increase over last summer.

Tensions over parking have emerged between the town and local beachgoers, particularly surfers in recent months. The dispute—which has also played out in other coastal North Carolina towns—is fueled by long-simmering class concerns in the Wilmington area, where some residents say beach access is eroding for lower-income people. Local leaders say they need the money to protect the beach and provide things like ocean lifeguards and sanitation services.

In 2019, street parking cost $3 an hour. Each increase has prompted pushback. In 2024, a petition calling for a reduced rate for locals received thousands of signatures. 

Surf Mamas, which, as the name suggests, is a group for moms who surf, launched a petition this year for free parking in Wrightsville Beach after 5 p.m. on weekdays. As of late July, it had 13,906 signatures. 

At the April meeting, the regional chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, a national group that advocates for equitable beach access, supported the free parking petition. 

Jenna Haverstock, the president of local environmental nonprofit Plastic Ocean Project, told town officials that she has had difficulty finding volunteers for beach cleanups due to the fees. 

“As someone who has completed and coordinated innumerable beach cleanups at no cost to the Wrightsville Beach community, paid parking is a barrier for us to get volunteers out here,” she said. 

“It should not be a privilege to access the beach––it should be a right,” she said. 

The board didn’t discuss the issue. They allowed three people to speak about parking during the public comment period, then moved on to the rest of the agenda. After the meeting, a town official told the group he had rejected their petition. The surfers say they plan to regroup.

The Bridge

Wrightsville Beach, while part of the greater Wilmington metropolitan area, is a separate town with its own mayor and municipal government. 

Though the coastline boasts a variety of surf breaks, Wrightsville Beach is the most frequented for Wilmington surfers. This is primarily due to its proximity, just 8.5 miles from downtown and five miles from UNC Wilmington. It covers a mere 1.3 square miles and has a year-round population of about 2,500, but it’s a popular tourist destination. During peak season, the town sees more than 30,000 visitors a day.

Two bridges connect Harbor Island, where the elementary school and municipal complex are located, with the beach. The Heide Trask Drawbridge connects it to Wilmington. When that bridge is raised for boat crossings, traffic can back up for miles. 

The most popular time to surf is from sunrise until 9 a.m., in part because of lighter winds and in part because it’s free to park then. 

There are approximately 1,882 parking spaces available in Wrightsville Beach. Just one parking lot has free two-hour parking: at the town municipal complex, which is a mile from the beach and has signs to indicate that those spaces are not for beach parking. 

This year, the town expects nearly $5.8 million in gross revenue from parking fees, though in past years revenue has exceeded its projections. The town administration and Board of Aldermen say money from parking helps support the town’s robust ocean lifeguard team, the police and fire departments, restroom maintenance, and litter collection. 

Proponents of the paid parking program say that those services primarily benefit visitors and that the burden of providing them should not be placed solely on local homeowners. 

“Providing a clean, safe, and sustainable beach requires extensive resources, most of which is the responsibility of the Town of Wrightsville Beach,” town manager Haynes Brigman said in an email. “Paid parking provides the Town an opportunity to recoup some of those costs from the actual users that are generating the need for the services.”

As one woman who has lived in Wrightsville Beach’s South End since the 1970s put it, visitors shouldn’t expect residents’ taxes to subsidize their beach experience. (She didn’t want to be named in the story because she feels there is a negative perception of residents from “in-town people.”) 

The way she sees it, the enjoyment you get from the beach is similar to a day at a theme park or a movie theater, and those activities aren’t free. 

Paid parking revenue also supports the town’s general fund, which the latest financial report says has “the necessary resources to recover from emergencies such as hurricanes, floods, or the recent pandemic.” Last year, the town also budgeted $1 million for beach renourishment, which adds sand to the coastline to fight erosion. (The most recent renourishment project, completed in March 2024, was federally funded, so some visitors note that their tax dollars already help protect the beach.) 

State law bars most cities from using parking revenue for anything other than parking and traffic enforcement, but Wrightsville Beach received a statutory exemption in 1998. That has helped Wrightsville Beach keep property taxes at the lowest rate in the county. The median house in Wrightsville Beach is worth $1.5 million and the town’s tax rate was 9.23 cents per $100 in 2024, compared to Wilmington, where the median home value is $417,310 and the rate was 42 cents per $100.

In 2001, the exemption was updated to include “certain municipalities in New Hanover County.” Carolina Beach, Kure Beach, Surf City, Topsail, and Oak Island all have paid-parking programs now. 

The closest beach to Wilmington with free parking is 30 miles away in Southport. (And that almost changed last month, but the town tabled a plan to charge for parking following local opposition.)

Before the 1940s, a trolley ran from the south end of Wrightsville Beach to downtown Wilmington, allowing citydwellers easy travel back and forth. The trolley cost 25 cents to ride, which included a bathing suit rental. But once highway construction began in the area in 1935, the trolley’s days were numbered.

Today, there is no public transit to the beach. Cape Fear Public Transportation Authority, also known as Wave Transit, has proposed municipal bus routes over the years, but Wrightsville Beach officials have repeatedly voted it down, citing concerns such as costs to the town.

The Country Club

Thaddeus Brown is a local engineer and surfer. As he sees it, the paid parking issue is emblematic of the class divide in the region. 

In 2023, the median household income of Wilmington was $71,372, while Wrightsville Beach’s was $167,273, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

The tensions that arise from this are evident in the local surf scene, Brown said. Wrightsville has a generally friendly surf culture compared to other places—it’s not crowded enough here to spark fist fights—but people can get edgy, especially during a bigger swell. 

Brown grew up on Long Island and spent a summer mowing lawns to buy his first surfboard. The best surfers there, he said, were the ones who came from similar working-class backgrounds, and they fiercely protected their spot in the lineup. “The reason we are aggressive is because they have everything,” he said. He’s wary of signs of money in surfing, like name-brand board shorts and expensive boards.

“Wrightsville Beach is turning into a place where they don’t want regular people,” he said. (This sentiment was familiar—many surfers called it a wannabe Figure Eight Island or Hilton Head.) “My buddies and I used to joke: You can’t go to the beach if you’re poor no more.”

When it comes to local leaders and parking, he said, “To them, ‘oh, it’s a dollar more.’ … It’s turning the beach into a country club.” 

Julimaria Cullins founded Surf Mamas, which now has more than 100 members, in 2020. She started the petition to allow free parking after 5 p.m. on weekdays in hopes that more locals could surf, or even just enjoy a beach walk after work. She said nearly a quarter of parking transactions last year came from residents of Wilmington or greater New Hanover County, according to data she obtained from Brigman, the town manager. 

In addition to the petition, Cullins and fellow Surf Mamas Kaylan Ganus, KC Hackney, and Kelly Wolfe presented a formal proposal to town officials at the April board meeting. On May 23, Brigman told the group the town wasn’t planning any changes to the parking program. In an email to the Surf Mamas, he said letting go of that parking revenue would place an undue burden on taxpayers. 

Now, Cullins believes the only way forward is through legislative change. She and her group plan to contact state representatives to challenge the town’s exemption on how parking revenue can be used.

This may be difficult. In 2021, after the town doubled hourly parking rates, locals created a petition to repeal the exemption. State Rep. Ted Davis Jr., who represents Wrightsville Beach, declined to support it, saying at the time, “This is a local issue and should be handled by the local governmental entities involved, and not by the State.” 

Cullins doesn’t buy that the town needs the revenue. “The town is healthy financially,” she said. “We’ve seen the financial reports. This isn’t about their economic survival.” 

“On the surface it’s about parking, but it’s much more than this,” she said. “It has always been a social equity issue. Marginalized groups—be it by income, age, or circumstance—are being pushed out of a public space that should belong to everyone.”

I’ve lived and surfed in the Wilmington area for six years, four of them on Wrightsville Beach. In my first few years here, I tutored students at New Hanover High School downtown. Several of them told me they’d never once been to the beach despite living here their whole lives. 

“How would I get there, and how would I pay?” one high school junior told me. I was struck; I had been around his age when I first learned to surf and found solace from my teenage frustrations in the ocean.

North Carolina’s constitution embraces the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that holds the coastline as a natural resource preserved for public use. This doctrine has been upheld in court; for example, in 2016 the state Supreme Court dismissed a case in which Emerald Isle beachfront property owners tried to block the public from accessing the sand in front of their home. The sand from the water’s edge to the high-tide mark on the coastline is public land—you just have to be able to get there.

Peak Season

In interviews around town, residents—many of whom didn’t want to be quoted on a contentious local issue—had mixed feelings about the parking program. All of them talked about how much the town has changed in recent decades: more vehicle traffic, more tourists, and more municipal regulations. 

Some supported paid parking because it helps fund their ocean lifeguard program, police department, and parks department. Others were critical, citing how difficult it is to have friends or family visit. Many said that public transit could help with traffic and parking concerns. One longtime resident described the seasonal beach traffic as a safety concern. During peak season, she said, the single-lane roads in town are so congested that emergency vehicles cannot easily get through. 

Jeff DeGroote, an alderman and owner of South End Surf Shop, voted against the increase to the daily parking rate this year. He cited a negative effect on local businesses if parking costs drive away potential shoppers. “It’s already hard enough to operate down here, seeing that we’re a seasonal place,” DeGroote said.

Nancy Rose Vance, 77, grew up in an oceanfront house on East Asheville Street. Her father, Lawrence Rose, served as an alderman in the 1960s. Back then, her family raised beagles in the house and let them roam the beach. Now, the town bans dogs on the beach from April through September. 

Frustrated by the parking situation, Vance posted on Facebook last month about giving her daughter and grandchildren rides to the beach so they can avoid both traffic and the parking fees. 

“I think about working families with little children who deserve to go to a beautiful beach for a family day without having to spend that kind of money,” she said in an interview. “I think it’s obscene. Anybody living in the area who wants to go to a public beach with public access should be able to park, and I don’t think the cost of parking should be preventative.” 

I went surfing one morning not too long ago, arriving shortly after sunrise. The parking lot was already packed with pick-up trucks and vans. People waxed their boards and drained the dregs of their coffee. The surf was summertime good—waist-high and clean. Cullins was out there. I saw her silhouette on the other side of the pier, amid a group of women catching waves. 

At 8:45 a.m., the surfers started tapping their watches. These would be their last waves of the day. People left the beach, one by one, until only a handful were still in the water. The wind picked up and changed direction. The tide started to fill in.

I took my time getting out, hoping to get the perfect last wave. By the time I got back to my car, the parking lot was empty. 

Kaylie Saidin is a writer, editor, and educator based in Wilmington. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere.