Laguna’s New Beach Laws Taken With a Grain of Sand

Ever walked down the beach, tripped over a hole someone had left in the sand and muttered, “There oughta be a law”?

Now there is.

In an attempt mostly to give lifeguards more authority to curb public behavior on crowded beach days, the Laguna Beach City Council has formally banned such time-honored ocean-side practices as digging deep holes in the sand, tossing flying disks and staking out turf with large umbrellas.

“There’s an ordinance for everything,” grumbled Keith Hagadorn of Laguna Hills, who directed his three school-age children Thursday to fill in a 4-foot-deep well after a Laguna Beach lifeguard showed up. “The kids are having fun. That’s what we come here for.”

Up and down the curl of Main Beach on Thursday, surf worshipers grappled with a new legal reality on the heels of the City Council’s decision late Tuesday to amend a beach ordinance first enacted in the 1970s.

While city officials say the modified ordinance mostly spells out behavior historically barred when beaches are crowded, some beachgoers Thursday took the new code as a laughable bit of government excess.

“Are you allowed to play in the water anymore?” joked Rachel Tilton, 23, a teaching assistant at the Moulton Parkway YMCA in Laguna Niguel.

Tilton was among a handful of supervisors who were accompanying 33 children to Laguna’s Main Beach from a YMCA summer program. Tilton and half a dozen of the youngsters spent about 45 minutes digging a 2 1/2-foot-deep hole at the surf line, then rimming it with a kid-made berm. The plan was to make a seaside swimming puddle, something for the kids to jump into.

But then a lifeguard arrived.

“He said, ‘Don’t dig any deeper or wider because the jeeps can’t make it over,’ ” Tilton said. “I think he needs a bigger jeep.”

Mark Klosterman, the city’s chief of marine safety, said the changes are largely a matter of updating codes and listing specific acts that lifeguards already were asking people to stop.

Among the now-proscribed behaviors are digging holes deeper than 2 feet or leaving shallower holes unfilled; removing sand; playing sports that involve throwing balls, flying disks and other objects that could hurt another person; surf-casting with swimmers nearby; and swimming, surfing or scuba diving in conditions lifeguards consider hazardous.

Beachgoers also now are limited to 6-foot-diameter umbrellas to keep small groups from taking over large stretches of beach simply by putting up a large tarp, Klosterman said.

He emphasized that none of the barred behaviors are new, and that people still can bring balls and flying disks to the beach. Last year, lifeguards would have asked beachgoers to pull down large tarps too, or halted a flying-disk game that trampled on others.

Now, he said, the lifeguards have a clearly spelled out ordinance empowering them to do so, including keeping people from swimming when seas are treacherous.

“The reality is that we don’t order people out of the water due to rough waves,” Klosterman said. “We do go down to people and say, ‘There’s a red-flag surf, it’s extremely dangerous and we advise staying knee-deep.’ . . . [But] if that person says, ‘I don’t care. I’m going out,’ he’ll step out there and we’ll rescue him and bring him back.”

Klosterman said nearly all of the 30,000 annual code-enforcement actions involving lifeguards are settled without issuing citations. Conviction can lead to a maximum $1,000 fine and 6-month jail term, according to the municipal code.

Usually, though, when a lifeguard tells someone to stop doing something, the person stops, Klosterman said.

“There’s no change,” he said, clearly frustrated at perceptions that it’s now illegal to have fun in Laguna Beach. “It is exactly the same thing as we have been doing and all the beach cities have done for 20 years. . . . If you came down to the beach last summer and you were playing a game of football and it was impacting on the safety of others, the game would be stopped. It’s the same as today.”

Tilton, though, says things have changed.

Last summer, the YMCA took a similar group of kids to the same beach, where they dug an even deeper hole, she said. Nobody complained.

This year, they got busted.

“It was as deep as I was and three feet across,” Tilton said. “I needed help from another leader to get out. That’s why I was shocked [Thursday] when he came up and said to stop digging.”

There was, she said, a certain humor to it all.

“I’m 23 and I’m the one who’s in trouble,” Tilton said as the youngsters refilled the hole. “I thought he was going to put me in timeout.”