Laguna Beach establishes zones for shade coverings at beaches

The Laguna Beach City Council unanimously passed an ordinance on Tuesday that will establish limited zones for the use of multi-posted shade coverings by beachgoers.

This week’s meeting represented the second reading of the ordinance, so it will go into effect 30 days from its adoption and allow for enforcement in time for summer.

Shade coverings (other than umbrellas) — such as canopies and tents — will be limited to Main Beach and the southernmost section of Aliso Beach. They may be no more than 8 feet in width and depth and 6 feet in height. The shade structures must also comply with language requiring them to be in line with or behind a lifeguard tower.

Marina Safety Chief Kai Bond said the ordinance will effectively ban canopies on about 95% of the city’s beaches.

Public safety, specifically lines of sight to the ocean, had been a driving force of the discussion as the city considered bringing forth an ordinance in recent months.

Some residents had hoped that the ordinance might be expanded to place a ban on canopies and tents in beach-adjacent parks — Aliso Beach, Crescent Bay Point, Heisler, Main Beach and Montage parks. One speaker suggested the allowance would serve to relocate, rather than eliminate, ongoing issues such as overcrowding.

“The barbecues that are in Heisler Park, … people show up at 6 o’clock in the morning, or whenever you can come to a park, and then monopolize it all day long,” Claudia Redfern said. “You should be able to only stay there for two hours, or four hours, and I think that would help to eliminate some of these if we spread it around and not have a group of people come in and monopolize one part of our city [to the point that] we as residents can’t even use it.”

Bond responded to a number of concerns following the public hearing.

“I can see the concern about the adjacent city parks,” Bond said. “The 8-by-8, the 10-by-10, the 12-by-12 E-Z Up, they all do exist. We’ve been enforcing E-Z Up regulations for decades now, so we have quite a bit of experience in the easy-up zones that we’ve identified on Main Beach and Aliso of having people shrink it down to 8-by-8. I think those zones are responsible.”

Councilwoman Sue Kempf has been advocating for an outright ban of shade coverings. In a discussion geared toward forming recommendations for an ordinance on Jan. 23, Kempf had suggested that pop-up shade coverings like the E-Z Up brand should also be banned for parks and picnic areas.

“I just think it’s a lot easier to ban something if you just out and out ban it,” Kempf said during Tuesday’s meeting.

City officials indicated they would be willing to review the policy after some time had passed to determine its effectiveness.

“I thought it would be difficult to do an all-out ban all at once,” Mayor Mark Orgill said. “I thought that this would give us a little time to see if somebody could convince me if other ideas would work. … I’ll stick with my decision for now.”

Another issue raised during the public hearing was the possibility of illegal activities taking place within the tents. Orgill said he shared concerns about enforcement and inquired as to whether public safety officials had witnessed “any shenanigans,” including, as one speaker suggested, the conducting of business within them.

Bond said “sales” were not something he had personally witnessed.

“The beach is an open, public area, so it’s very difficult to point to specific things and say, ‘There’s shenanigans here,’ or, ‘There’s wrongdoings here.’ I can understand what the comments are, but I think a lot of it can be mitigated if we do have these zones, and we can look specifically at them, and again, see if it works and have this discussion a year from now to better understand it.”