‘We didn’t want to have to go through another summer like this,’ says Rockport resident

Residents of the riverside village of Rockport have growing concerns that the overcrowding of tourists in their community will only get worse.

“The over-tourism and excessive economic development in a small village such as ours really destroys the essence of what people come to see,” says Elisabeth Sterken, a resident of Rockport.

Elisabeth Sterken and her friend Margot Miller are both residents of Rockport and they say they are at their breaking point.

Their previously quiet street is now regularly congested with tourist buses and visiting vehicles. Crowds of people come to board the Rockport boat line cruises on a daily basis during the summer months, making the village no longer feel like a community, they say, but a parking lot.

Miller and the neighbours have tracked over 200 vehicles driving onto their street within an hour on the holiday long weekend.

“We’ve seen it increase over the past three years, because the boat line has doubled their capacity and the marina is also increasing its capacity,” says Sterken.

In May, over 50 village residents submitted a report to the township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands, expressing their concerns over the overcrowding tourists and how it is affecting them personally.

Miller told Global News that she was told that if she wanted things to change, she would have to move.:

“They say we are working on it,” Miller says, “but we didn’t want to have to go through another summer like this.”

Global News has reached out to Rockport tourism for a statement but has yet to receive any comment on the matter.

There have been no concrete changes to the overcrowding of tourist, but Sterken says the Leeds and Thousand Islands council have installed a camera on the street as part of a traffic survey, in order to monitor exactly how many vehicles are entering the village.