North Carolina Outer Banks village residents want ‘Beach Week’ to be displaced
Last June, “Beach Week” brought a lot of high school graduates to the quiet village of Corolla on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. This caused chaos and a lot of damage, and locals vowed it wouldn’t happen again this year.
Authorities in North Carolina said that most of those teens came from the Washington area, especially Northern Virginia, where parents and other adults were willing to break the rules and the law to help them.
Vacation homes that were trashed, indoor furniture that was dragged into the water, and drunk teens who used the bathroom or fell asleep on the lawns of nearby homes. The people who own the property and the police say they saw everything and more.
Corolla Civic Association President Barbara Marzetti said, “We saw kids pull up with their moms, unload their stuff, which included cases of beer and hard cider, and then the moms just left.” “There must have been 14 or 16 of them.”
In the fall, the Corolla Civic Association held a meeting with law enforcement, property owners, and vacation rental property managers to talk about the problems caused by the thousands of high school students who come to the area from early to mid-June.
Teens have been coming to Corolla in large numbers for beach week for the past two years. Beach week isn’t just one week, but the three weeks after graduations in June.
In a news release, the association said, “The goal was to come up with strategies and plans to stop the crazy shenanigans and fights that happened during Beach Week in 2022.”
Visitors growing in droves
In the last two years, the number of visitors to the Outer Banks as a whole has reached a record high. In Corolla, on the northern Outer Banks in Currituck County, almost all of the summer rooms are already booked for 2022.
In June of last year, North Carolina alcohol enforcement agents and deputies made 116 arrests over two days in an effort to stop “hooliganism.” This included 66 charges of underage drinking, 32 charges of using fake IDs, 23 drug-related offenses, and two ABC violations for businesses, according to the Currituck County Sheriff’s Office.
The release said, “The community felt very strongly that the increasing number of Beach Week mobs of kids acting in horrible, intolerable ways is hurting (Corolla’s) hard-earned reputation as a family-friendly vacation spot.”
The association is writing a letter to high school principals, superintendents, school boards, and private schools in Northern Virginia, the Washington area, and New Jersey. These are the places where the most beach week high school graduates have come from. Officials wouldn’t say which school districts the letters would be sent to.
Brook Sparks, the owner and property manager at Coast Realty, said that she has been in the business for a long time and that beach week has been a problem for years, and not just in Corolla.
“I saw my first bottle of Cristal.”
About eight years ago, it was Nags Head, which was full of spring breakers and cash. Sparks said, “That’s the first bottle of Cristal I’ve ever seen.” “I’m just laying in the tub.”
Authorities in Nags Head made it hard for people to party during spring break in the years that followed, but now young college students celebrating life’s big moments have found Corolla.
Sparks said that property managers work together and with the police to catch and stop bad behavior quickly, sometimes even before the contracts are signed.
“Their names are now put into a database,” Sparks said. “Sometimes we’ll call and say, ‘You can cancel right now without any fees or damages. If I kick you out, you won’t get any money back.”
When the crowds come, property managers “do drive-bys and spot checks” for each other to make sure vacationers aren’t getting out of hand.
Sparks said that there is even “Operation Filter,” in which maintenance comes during the week to do “mandatory” air filter checks.
Sparks said that this year, they are “pulling out all the stops.” There will be more security and twice as many police officers as last year. Any illegal activity or lease violations will not be tolerated.
Sparks said, “They’re sending people to jail.” “These kids need to think, because the choices they make now could affect them for the rest of their lives.”
Keeping the law, being aware
Because of all the young people, many owners have stopped renting during the last three weeks of June. Sparks said, “For them, the risk is just not worth it.”
Almost all rental agencies in the Outer Banks require that vacationers come as a family and that the renter be at least 25. Even so, beach week rentals are still happening.
“A disturbing trend is that more and more parents and chaperones don’t care about the law or their responsibilities under rental leases. They seem to want to be the “cool” parents,” the civic association said in a press release.
Officials in Currituck found that parents and other adults were renting homes online for groups of teenagers, but they never showed up. Even the Herndon high school newspaper had a story about how to get ready for beach week, with tips like having “a parent or older sibling” sign the rental agreements.
Marzetti said that this year, sheriff’s deputies and property managers will focus on “wayward chaperones.” They will be charged with crimes and evicted if they are not there, have too many people in the house, or damage the property. Sparks said that some agencies check the main renters’ backgrounds before any contracts are signed.
Marzetti said that owners and managers of vacation rentals should go to the county magistrate to speed up evictions. When deputies get a court order to evict, they do so right away.
“The main message is that Corolla is a great place for families to visit and a terrible place for wild, out-of-control parties that lead to fights with other residents and visitors, making them afraid for their safety,” the association said in a press release.
“We hope that this information will be shared with students and parents so that everyone knows that “gone wild” behavior won’t be allowed here.”
