STONE HARBOR – The problems with summer help for the last two years may just have people spooked, but there is a nagging worry when the application pool does not seem as large as it needs to be.
No positions have been more problematic up and down the shoreline than those of lifeguards. Towns have raised salary scales, used incentives to encourage guards to stay later in the season, and, in some cases, have had to limit the extent of covered beaches.
At an April 19 meeting of Stone Harbor Borough Council, Beach Patrol head Sandy Bosacco admitted that the application pool for summer 2022 guards was not as robust as he’d like it to be.
Bosacco said he had 16 applications from returning lifeguards and nine from new individuals. That is a total of 25 against a need for 65 guards for the season.
Bosacco said he wasn’t worried yet.
“It’s early,” he noted, adding that “the application numbers do seem lower than normal.”
The same nagging concern is present in other municipal departments that depend on summer help. In Stone Harbor, an area of understaffing the last two years has been in Public Works, where staffing levels have played havoc with the borough’s busy summer trash pickup schedule.
As for the beaches, Bosacco said he is not recommending any changes to the beach coverage that was in place last year. He hopes the application numbers will improve, as warmer weather nudges college students into thinking more about how they are going to spend their summer.
