City to guard some private beaches and pools

By Neil Schulman
Long Branch — The city may be providing lifeguards to almost every condo and hotel with a beach this summer.
At the March 27 City Council workshop, Stan Dziuba, OEM Coordinator for Long Branch, said that they had been approached by Harbor Manor, the Villas, the Ocean Place hotel, and Ocean Cove, who were interested in seeing if the city would provide lifeguard services for their beaches this summer.
The private company that all of them had been using has gone out of business.

Dziuba says Long Branch crunched the numbers, and it can manage the work with the manpower it has. “Ballpark figures were all fine with it,” he said, and the groups seem okay with the city’s tentative rates.

From the city’s point of view, it makes things easy, since it gives their lifeguards almost uninterrupted control from the Deal border north. Only one condo, the Imperial House, wouldn’t be supervised by the city’s lifeguards.

“Every other beach, if we do it, we have complete control of it,” Dziuba said.

Dziuba had come to discuss the matter because council would need to approve any final agreement, and he wanted to make sure they were on board with the idea.

ABC license change

Before getting an Alcoholic Beverage Control license, required to serve any alcohol at an establishment, you need to pass a criminal background check, showing you haven’t been convicted of certain crimes.

One day, Chief Jason Roebuck was examining and signing a card for approval when he realized something.

“I’m looking at the name and I go ‘I arrested this person seven years ago,’” Roebuck said. The crime would have disqualified them from getting the license.

The reason for this is a loophole in the current law. You only need to do a background check the first time you get the permit, and the person in question had applied 14 years ago.

One of the reasons the city did this is because the reapplication fee is $10 a year.

“That’s not enough to run your fingerprints again,” Roebuck said.

The proposed change will change the fee to the cost of getting fingerprinted (which is handled by a third party, not at the police department). Since it’s more expensive, the city will make the license good for two years at a time instead of one.

That change will also help police with the processing. Any bartender or waiter who works in a place where alcohol is served requires these permits, so Long Branch issues quite a few.