This team will be responsible for all beach and neighborhood issues short of violent crime, felony level stuff. The program that has been put together is highly crafted to attract people for very long term career opportunities so we get people who will be with us, get to personally know the neighborhoods and that we can get to know as well. That said, it is an incredibly long a painstaking process to find these canidates, train them and bring this department up to speed.
They are called Park Rangers because that is a state level of certification, responsibility, authority, and training that fits with being able to enforce things on the beach, and in the range of actions anticipated for these people. SInce they are not a full police officer in the sense they do not carry firearms, some work had to be done to make sure they have a designation that fits the right state category
This will take well through the winter to finish getting put into place. In the meantime, the plan is to physically come down to the beaches and drive through the neighborhoods daily and as more people are added in. ramp up the support.
The big concern here is that this is all funded by the rate increase in the parking meters to deal with all the extra costs incurred by tourism on our city and in particular, our residential neighborhoods that were NEVER designed with any thought at all of massive public use access.
Originally, we were told that the Park Rangers would be not on regular patrol and have a focus on the neighborhoods. Now, they have somewhat expanded the resources (extra management and part time people) but are using them for everything in the city that is basically below felony and not violent. There are no more meter maids or beach patrol so this force handles all that, traffic, etc. I may not have all that quite right but you get the drift.
I think this is all going to be going in the right direction. We will definitely benefit from having committed, high level, long term people dealing with our issues on the streets and on the beach. We will need to pay a lot of attention to make sure we do get the resources necessary to deal with the issues that were driving all this in the first place. Stay tuned.