Lifeguard staffing is no beach.
Not all beaches will be open for swimming when the season officially kicks off on Memorial Day weekend — as the city has only secured a little over one-third of the necessary lifeguards.
Just 230 lifeguards have been hired so far out of the 600 needed to fully staff beaches, which open on Saturday, Department of Parks and Recreation officials said this week.
“It’s a very difficult and challenging hiring environment particularly for this group of workers,” Sue Donoghue, commissioner of the parks department, said at a City Council budget hearing Monday.
A lifeguard shortage nationwide, and the city’s “extensive” and “intense” 16-week training program have made finding enough staffers tough, Donoghue and other department officials said.
The program to become a city lifeguard is designed to make sure that trainees can properly patrol the Big Apple’s 14 miles of beaches and swim in rough ocean waves.
“You have to be able to do an extensive exam to make sure you can retrieve something in the water as though it were a person. It is quite complicated,” Iris Rodriguez-Rosa, First Deputy Commissioner of the city Department of Parks and Recreation, said during the hearing.
More than 550 lifeguards are currently in training, compared to just 375 trainees at this time last year, Rodriguez-Rosa said.
Officials attributed the boost in applicants in part to the city raising the hourly wage from $21 to $22 and adding a $1,000 bonus for lifeguards who stay through the end of the season.
With the return of seasonal workers, city officials said they expect to have about 900 lifeguards on-staff at the end of June, when pools open. More than 1,500 lifeguards are needed to patrol both beaches and pools.
The city also had approximately 900 lifeguards last year, when some pools and stretches of oceanfront had to be roped off due to the shortage.
“We are confident that we will end up with a total number that is larger this year than we had last year,” Meera Joshi, Mayor Eric Adams’ deputy mayor for operations, told reporters Tuesday when asked about the shortage.
The city ideally wants to have 1,000 lifeguards on staff, but “we don’t anticipate getting to quite those optimal levels,” Joshi said.
“We’ve had 560 members going through the training program. That’s much more than we had last year,” Joshi noted.
For Memorial Day weekend, parks officials said none of the city’s eight beaches will be closed entirely. Instead, New Yorkers can expect stretches of each beach to closed.
“We will be opening up our beaches on Memorial Day, but there will still be some segments of the beach that are closed,” Joshi said.
The parks department makes decisions about where to close based on a daily lifeguard staffing headcount, an official told The Post.
“We want to get as many beaches open as possible,” Adams said Tuesday.
The mayor raised eyebrows earlier this month when he waded into the lifeguard hiring discussion and suggested the city could fill the recruiting gap by hiring migrants because “they’re excellent swimmers.”
Adams told reporters the next day that he said that because he asked a room full of migrants who can swim and many of the migrants raised their hands.
The lifeguard drought comes as drownings in New York state have reached record highs. In 2021, the last year data is available, 230 New Yorkers drowned. In total from 2017 to 2021, more than 1,000 people drowned in the state.