Since late July, the Karl Stirner Arts Trail’s weekend visitors — be they runners, walkers, art-viewers, dogs or otherwise — have been greeted by bright orange traffic barrels, on which signs have been mounted declaring the trail for Easton residents only.

The limitation of the trail to just city residents is an effort to keep the trail clean and peaceful, said Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. The city is attempting to curb the number of out-of-towners that Panto said are coming en masse to the KSAT with picnic baskets, coolers or loudspeakers and leaving trash in their wake, polluting the Bushkill Creek and the surrounding wooded area.

“We don’t have picnic facilities,” Panto said. “We don’t have bathrooms. So what’s happened is they’re destroying the place.” The idea behind the restriction is that those coming in big groups with cookout or picnic equipment and large speakers are driving into Easton and to the trail from out of town, rather than walking from Downtown Easton or the city’s West Ward or College Hill.

While Panto said the city’s gotten a positive reaction from residents, not everyone is happy about the change. Some have taken to social media to question both the ethics and legality of closing the public trail to non-residents.

A poster in the Easton Facebook group “Easton PA Post” cited Article 1 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: “Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”

The trail itself is public land. The Karl Stirner Arts Trail nonprofit manages the art adorning the trail as well as trail programming, but the land is part of Easton’s public park system.

Initially, employees of the park system were stationed at the trail’s entrances to verify if trail-users were Easton residents, but they’ve since been replaced with Easton police officers. “(The parks employees) were taking a lot of abuse from people who are refusing to listen to them and going in anyway,” Panto said.

The mayor said that the signs are just there for big groups of people, which is the primary issue the city is trying to solve. “We don’t stop people who are, if they’re non-residents, are just walking or running on the trail,” Panto said. “We don’t stop them.”

The issues aren’t new to the area. Upstream, Palmer Township’s Penn Pump Park has had similar issues. Back in 2015 and 2016, the township began limiting park attendance and instituting new rules in order to fix the overcrowding, littering and general disrespect of the public space. The action the township took did end up having some positive results that made the popular park a much more palatable place to be.

Easton has made a similar effort in past years to curb similar behaviors — like picnics, cookouts, littering and jumping off the pedestrian bridges — on the Karl Stirner Arts Trail. Executive orders, parking lot closures and regular trail patrols have all attempted to put an end to the apparent stream of out-of-town groups polluting the area around the trail.

The city is only a few weeks into its new traffic-barreled experiment, and while it’s too soon to make a declaration on its success in putting a stop to the disturbances Panto said are plaguing the trail, the city is hoping that the last month of the summer along the Bushkill is much quieter.

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Connor Lagore may be reached at clagore@njadvancemedia.com.