The South Haven City Council has approved the purchase of $85,000 in equipment to support its new beach lifeguard program after a discussion Monday.
Speaking at the council’s regular meeting, City Manager Kate Hosier said time is of the essence to get the supplies in place to restart the lifeguard program by the target date of Memorial Day. However, council member Tom Capps balked at the purchase of two lifeguard towers for $65,000 and two lifeguard stands at $20,000, wondering if there are other options.
“For all due diligence, I don’t want to stop the program at all,” Capps said. “I would like us to maybe look at buying one tower, give it a week or so to maybe find out if there’s somebody local, which I know a couple people that do stuff like this. And maybe we could save us some money instead of spending $85,000 on projects, maybe we can have these towers in more in the $50,000 range. So that’s the reason why I’d like to have a stock about this.”
Police Chief Adam DeBoer said the lifeguards will need at least two towers to cover all of South Beach, adding the structures will also provide them with shelter in inclement weather. However, he added they will also adapt to the conditions.
“We will make it work,” DeBoer said. “It just may not be the best. And myself and the people on the on the committee for this want it to be the best. We don’t want to put something out there that is, for lack of a better word, half-baked.”
Council member Dave Flack said the priority should be on serving the community.
“We want this to be right and we want it to work the right way and so we need the right equipment for that,” Flack said.
Hosier said the equipment is just one expense that will come with having a lifeguard program, adding some revenue source will be needed to support it.
“I can tell you very definitively the parking fees do have to go up,” Hosier said. “What is also not on the — what should be on the table is that this is the last year for a three-year annual pass. We need to have a good conversation about do we still need to give out that pass because that’s money out the door. There’s some hard decisions that this council is going to have to make, but I can tell you right now we are looking at the parking fees going up, parking fines, all parking fines. All parking fines will have to go up. All the fines and fees that are captured on the beach goes into the Beach Enterprise Fund. That’s where the revenues for those beaches come from. They also pay for the beach patrol. They also pay for capital improvements. And we do know that we have some aged structures out there. We also know we have undersized structures.”
Capps suggested having the structures built locally, but motions to purchase the stations and the towers were both approved with only Jeff Arnold voting against them.
