City Beach lifeguard program will again be paused for summer 2024

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It will be another summer season without lifeguards manning the stands at City Beach, with officials citing “the demographic and shifting employment environment over the last few years.”

That was according to Sandpoint Recreation Supervisor Katie Bradbury at the May 15 meeting of the Sandpoint City Council. Jason Wiley left the position of recreation supervisor in December 2023, and Bradbury has been on the job for about a month.

Wiley painted a similar picture related to the lifeguard situation last year, telling the Reader that the beach needs to have between 11 and 16 lifeguards on duty to adequately operate at full capacity.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lifeguard program, with no students in the training pipeline during those years. That resulted in an acute shortage by 2023, leading to the program being paused.

“Recognizing the larger challenges faced by not just Sandpoint, but cities all over the country, in recruiting and retaining lifeguards, the city has decided to put the lifeguard program on pause again in 2024,” Bradbury told the council. 

Rather, the city will transition its resources to providing aquatics-based instruction and supervised free swim opportunities at City Beach, including activities such as games, crafts and sports geared toward local youth between 5 and 12 years of age.

“This lifeguarding program typically takes many weeks and months to train lifeguards appropriately and there simply wasn’t time to do that or staff to oversee it,” Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm said. “So I take my hat off to Katie because she has come up with an interim solution.”

The program is planned to run in July and August as a half-day summer camp with room for about 60 students per day attending separate morning and afternoon sessions of three hours.

The city is currently looking to recruit instructors or counselors, and aims to have a participant-to-staff ratio of 1-10. 

Grimm said he’d received “a lot of feedback from the public” about the shortage of lifeguards — specifically related to liability. According to Grimm, the American Red Cross requires one lifeguard per 25 swimmers. 

“Some days we have upwards of 300 swimmers, so that would be like 12 lifeguards on duty,” he said. “I can only imagine that if we don’t meet those standards we would probably expose ourselves to liability for not meeting standards.”

Because of that, Grimm added, other waterfront communities in Idaho have also moved away from lifeguard programs.

“It’s an expensive and challenging and time-consuming subject, and we’ll discuss it further during the budget sessions that we’ll go through, but this at least gets kids and families introduced to the skills they need to swim independently and I think it’s going to be very popular,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bradbury said that other programs offered by the YMCA and Schweitzer were already fully booked and with waitlists for the summer, making the city’s program even more necessary.

Christine Moon and Rebecca Holland were the only citizens to sign up to speak on the agenda item — which was informational only and required no action by the council. Moon asked councilors to consider “reprioritizing” lifeguards, saying that lacking them at the beach is “shocking” to many residents.

“This is a public safety issue; the largest portion of the general fund is public safety, and it seems a little incomprehensible that there wouldn’t be enough resources to be able to prioritize this public safety issue,” she said. “We shouldn’t be relying on attentive bystanders to handle a potential crisis or a potential tragedy.”

Holland said that the council in July 2023 “made a commitment that they were going to improve the wages, saying that that was the reason they were unable to hire kids; that it was less than flipping burgers.”

Wiley told the Reader in May 2023 that the city had already raised wages, but that the problem remained a lack of trained lifeguards, who must undergo a 20-hour class through the Red Cross.

“I think it’s a huge liability for the city to be just backing away from this commitment that was made and is so much needed,” Holland said. “Please don’t just drop this. I think this would be something that will have a real impact on our community, so please let’s try to get it going because there is the money there.”