Flagler County Administrator Heidi Peito is proposing to end the county’s annual grant to Flagler Beach that for years has paid for half the cost of the city’s lifeguard program. Without that money, the city may have to either shrink its 15-block zone of lifeguard-covered shoreline or space out its lifeguard towers further, increasing response times in drowning or distress incidents. At least one city commissioner is questioning whether the city could keep financing the program on its own.
Last year Flagler Beach’s 31 lifeguards conducted 241 rescues and took 1,800 preventive actions, with zero drownings, according to figures submitted to the United States Lifesaving Association.
Since 2017, when the city and the county signed a joint agreement ensuring that the county would contribute 50 percent of the funding, lifeguards have conducted 1,132 rescues, with zero drownings in the guarded portions of the beach.
There have been zero drownings along the guarded beaches since 2009, the earliest year of USLA data. In contrast, there have been seven drownings on unguarded portions of Flagler County beaches over that span. (The USLA calculates the chance of a drowning off a protected beach at 1 in 18 million.) .
The elimination of next year’s $106,000 grant is part of $1.4 million in “operational efficiency adjustments,” as Petito called them in her presentation to the County Commission today.
If county commissioners appeared surprised, Flagler Beach commissioners were stunned. None of the four interviewed today had heard of the proposal.
“It would be incredibly disappointing if Flagler County slashes lifeguard funding,” Commissioner Scott Spradley said. “We are already scrambling to find funding for beach maintenance to protect our county beaches from storm erosion. The idea of possibly shrinking the area of guarded beaches at a time of unprecedented population growth is a dreadful option. I am all about trimming the budget to cut out unnecessary funding. But funding for beach safety is a necessity, not an excess.”
Commission Chair James Sherman had spoken with City Manager Dale Martin earlier this week–not about Petito’s proposal, of which he was not aware, but to ask whether the manager had discussed with the county the possibility of expanding lifeguard coverage to account for the surging population. “Specifically to our north where there are parks for casual beach-goers,” Sherman said, “because my concern was that our lifeguards are going to be overwhelmed with the crowds that come to our beaches that have lifeguards.”
Petito said she told Martin of her plan two weeks ago over lunch “so that he wasn’t surprised.” The county’s contribution pays only for salaries, not for equipment and other needs of the program.
“When I told him about this cut and that this had been something that had been discussed,” Petito said, “he didn’t think that it was going to be a significant impact, that what it meant to him would be that if he didn’t have the funding, he would shrink the coverage of lifeguard area in Flagler Beach. So it didn’t seem like this was a huge detriment. You may recall, we don’t have lifeguards in any of our county parks that our visitors go to, and so when I mentioned it to him about the potential reduction, so that he would be aware of it during his budget preparations, he could share that with his board so that they could come up with another remedy.” (Martin could not be reached today to verify the account.)
“What are they thinking?” Flagler Beach Commissioner Rick Belhumeur said of the county. “Maybe they think that only our residents benefit from lifeguard protection. It’s actually quite the opposite. Most of our residents walk to the beach near where they live, some for the convenience while others would rather take their dogs with them or stay away from the more crowded areas of the beach. Losing this will create another unfunded convenience provided for everyone 100% paid for by the Flagler Beach taxpayers.”
Tom Gillin, Flagler Beach’s long-time parks and recreation director who oversees the lifeguard program, was not aware of the possibility of a cut. He had already prepared the budget he was submitting to the city commissioners, with the county’s contribution included.
This year’s lifeguard coverage will not be affected. The budgets Petito and Gillin are referring to go in effect in October, with the lifeguard portion of the budget kicking in next April. The county made its full contribution to this year’s lifeguard program last December. The lifeguard season begins in late April, with weekend coverage only. From Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day, lifeguards are on the beach seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. They revert to weekend coverage after Labor Day and through October.
There are four lifeguard towers north of the pier and three south of it, at 150 to 200 feet intervals, with 13 lifeguards with eyes on the ocean at any given time (ot all of them on towers). If the budget is cut, “we’d have to spread our lifeguard towers further apart, and the other option would be to close up the zone and just have less towers on the beach,” Gillin said.
Spreading them apart reduces the rescue-response time, intended to abide by a 30-second rule. Gillin said when a swimmer in distress reaches the “active drowning stage,” the swimmer may have just 20 to 60 seconds before submerging. “We want to be able to reach everybody within the zone of my tower within 30 seconds.” Reducing or spreading towers further apart increases response time.
Commission Chair Andy Dance said there is a possibility that revenue from the county’s tourism sales surtax could be used to fund lifeguards. Gillin, echoing Carney, said that’s the case in the Panhandle, but the law requires that a tourism budget be $10 million or more to trigger the allowance to use money on public safety.
Petito is also proposing a $75,000 cut in grant funding to social service agencies such as the Family Life Center–the shelter for abused persons that this year received $92,500)–Grace Community Food Pantry ($9,000 this year), Flagler Volunteer Services ($25,000) and SMA Behavioral Health Services ($173,300), among others. Petito did not specify which agency would lose what portion of its funding, only that the lifeguard program would lose all of its county funding. (See a list of current funding by agency here.)
Commissioners were not thrilled by what Dance called an “abrupt change” in the county’s grants to different agencies, suggesting that some of Petito’s proposals may face resistance, at least in this budget cycle.
There is also some question regarding Petito’s authority unilaterally to cut Flagler Beach’s funding. Both joint agreements controlling the arrangement–the 2017 beach management agreement that included the lifeguard program in one section, and a subsequent 2020 agreement focused exclusively on the lifeguard programs–were so-called “interlocal agreements.”
Those were policy instruments jointly approved by the Flagler Beach City Commission and the County Commission. They may not be abrogated by the county administrator without commissioners’ approval, though either Flagler Beach or the county may pull out.
The 2017 agreement, for example, states that “Together, the Parties shall both continue to develop their ocean/beach rescue programs and coordinate where necessary to close gaps and improve service.” (Emphasis added.) The 2020 agreement is more specific: “The County shall provide the City with funding for lifeguard services in the form of a lump annual payment.”
At the same time, both agreements soon walk back the “shall”: “The Parties understand that performance of this Agreement is contingent upon annual appropriation of adequate funds by the City and/or the County to perform their obligations under the Agreement,” the 2020 document states. So Flagler County is not obligated to make the payments if money isn’t available. But since it is a joint agreement, that decision appears to rest with county commissioners, not the county administrator–who is nevertheless free to propose the cut.
Ending the program, however, will mean the end of the interlocal agreement, and that requires an affirmative commission action, not an administrative action.
To Flagler Beach Commissioner Eric Cooley, that would be irresponsible on several levels. “It seems the newly elected in the county severely undervalue the number one asset of the county in many ways,” he said. “Without having a guarded or maintained beach, county risks having a massive unintended negative consequence across the economic spectrum of the county. The elected should review Petito’s slides on the contribution the coastline makes to the entire tax drivers of the county.”
Cooley noted that the coverage area has already been scaled back. It once stretched from North 10th to South 10th, and now does only from North 8th to South 7th. “Losing 25 percent or more of the funding,” he said (it is actually closer to 50 percent) “puts the program at risk altogether in my personal opinion. It’s a county asset run by the city but underutilized by the local taxpayers of the city. There comes a point where if the partners don’t support it, one has to evaluate if it even makes sense or is fiscally responsible.”
