Long Beach community speaks on changes to beach season

A lot has happened in Long Beach in the past two weeks.

City officials held a news conference on June 14 on the boardwalk at Riverside Boulevard, announcing immediate changes to beach access rules in the wake of an unexpectedly large gathering on the beach and a shooting at the Long Beach train station the previous day.

The shooting, and the changes to the beach season, were the focus of discussion at the City Council meeting on June 18 as well. City Manager Dan Creighton addressed it all during his opening message.

The changes he announced had gone into effect June on 14. Up until then, beach passes were to be required only on weekends until the last Thursday of the month. With Creighton’s ruling, the summer season effectively began 13 days early, meaning that beachgoers needed to produce passes every day of the week.

Creighton’s executive order to immediately start the beach season, rather than wait until this Thursday, was discussed, voted on and approved by the council members. At the meeting, numerous community members spoke their minds about what happened and the measures being taken.

“This is a very complex situation,” resident Kathleen O’Leary said, referring to the gathering on June 13. “It has happened before, but it has usually happened in the night hours. I am very appreciative to the Long Beach police and also the partnership with the Nassau police.

“What I was thinking of is closing the beach to non-residents after 6 and having residents use the beach for free,” O’Leary added.

Creighton responded by saying that since the city accepted federal funding to redo the boardwalk and dunes after Superstorm Sandy, the beaches are required to be open to the public. Otherwise, he said, the city would have to pay back the money.

Community member Eileen Hession said her concern was about the number of lifeguards on duty the beach. She was on the boardwalk late one afternoon, she said, and saw a sudden influx of people. “I looked at my watch — it was six o’clock,” Hession recounted. “They didn’t have to pay to get on the beach anymore. I’m very nervous about having no lifeguards on duty.”

Rich Borowski, the city’s chief of lifeguards, said that although there were no guards on stands after 6, emergency response crews monitor the beaches in a truck.

“It just seems to me like a very knee-jerk reaction that the next day, via executive order, instead of via resolution, meeting, process, to define the new hours, to define things,” said resident and former Councilwoman Tina Posterli, now a candidate for the State Assembly. “Instead … getting a community up in arms, because we moved here for the access to the beach, as you all know.”

Council President Brendan Finn responded, saying that “great consideration” went into the city’s decision to effectively begin the summer beach season two weeks early. “I think we all felt that we needed to not just make a statement, but show that we are going to control our beaches so that we can really do our best to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. It was important that we make that statement and make some changes, and they’re not drastic changes by any means at all.”

Resident Michael Hawksby commended the city and the Police Department for the way they handled the situation. Hawksby, who is a former Marine, said it’s easy to look back after the fact and say things should have been done differently.

“These are children, these are kids,” he said of the hundreds of teens who gathered on the beach. “It’s easy to say after the fact what ‘shoulda, coulda, woulda.’ As long as you’re moving forward, you make the changes that you need to make if you see that some of this action is not warranted or a little harsh. But again, I congratulate you all, because this could have been a lot worse.”