Sandpoint takes down lifeguard stands at City Beach

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

City Hall has been debating what to do about Sandpoint’s moribund City Beach lifeguard program since at least the spring of 2023, when officials sounded the alarm about a shortage of individuals willing to sit on the stands and keep swimmers safe.

At that time, the COVID-19 pandemic had disrupted the training pipeline for qualified lifeguards, and discussions focused on increasing wages to attract applicants. Lacking anyone to sit on the City Beach stands, the program was suspended for both the summers of 2023 and 2024. In January, the city posted open positions for the 2025 summer season with a wage of $14.50 per hour. That pay was later increased to $16 per, but still no applicants came forward.

At the March 19 meeting, Councilor Pam Duquette asked whether lifeguard pay could be increased even further, noting that her granddaughter was making $18.50 an hour at Taco Bell.

“Something’s wrong. I mean, the lifeguards have responsibility,” she said.

Finally, at the May 21 meeting of the City Council, Community Planning and Development Director Jason Welker said that Sandpoint had made a more final decision to pull the plug on lifeguarding at City Beach, with the removal of the wooden stands that have stood for decades on the sands above the popular swimming location.

“The Parks crews did take down the lifeguard stands today,” Welker said on May 21, adding that Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm had directed the department to remove the structures because of “challenges we’ve had in hiring and staffing our lifeguard program.”

Removing the stands was “the responsible thing to do, so there’s not a perception of public safety where really it’s going to be up to parents to monitor their kids at the beach this summer, as it has been for the past few years,” Welker said.

Worries that inadequate staffing of lifeguards at the beach might put the city in legal jeopardy have been a part of the ongoing conversation on the issue for years. According to past and current city officials, City Beach needs between 11 and 16 lifeguards on staff to operate at full capacity, assuming the typical 300 or so swimmers at the downtown waterfront park. 

According to Grimm, the American Red Cross requires one lifeguard per 25 swimmers. 

“I can only imagine that if we don’t meet those standards we would probably expose ourselves to liability for not meeting standards,” Grimm said at the May 23, 2024 council meeting.

Officials have stated that the lifeguard shortage is not unique to Sandpoint, and that many other waterfront communities had already foregone staffing their beaches.

At the May 21 meeting, Duquette said she was “a little distraught” to see the lifeguard stands come down “with no thought of future lifeguards.”

Grimm responded that “there is thought of future lifeguards. It’s just when somebody walks out into a beach and sees a lifeguard stand, somehow — in the legal world — that could give them credibility to say, ‘I thought there were lifeguards there — I saw a lifeguard stand. Of course I let my 5-year-old who didn’t know how to swim go swimming unattended while I did something else.’ So it’s simply a preservation of liability and the prudent thing to do, considering we don’t have lifeguards.”

Duquette wondered whether the city would then have to rebuild lifeguard stands in the future — assuming there would be qualified applicants to serve on them — and pointed out that it would be an additional expense.

“I’m not an attorney, Councilwoman Duquette. I’m just trying to limit our liability,” Grimm said. “So what we can do next year [is] we can only hope that there’s a more robust interest in lifeguards and training lifeguards and a response from the community to sign up to be a lifeguard.”