By Jeffrey Pieters
Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN
A long history of drownings did not lead to permanently closing Rochester’s Foster-Arend pond.
But when swimmers return to the pond, when it opens after Memorial Day, they will find the beach to be more tightly managed than it has been in the past.
Rochester Park Board members voted unanimously on Tuesday to adopt a handful of new controls, including:
• Restricting beach hours to 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and restricting the surrounding park’s hours to 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. (regular hours for most Rochester parks is 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.). Beach access will be controlled by fence, and the parking lot entrances will have gates.
• Hiring an outside security firm, whose guards will staff the beach and patrol the pond perimeter. The cost estimate for the guards is $19,000.
• Banning alcohol from the entire park — including fishing sites and a nearby picnic area — except for users with special city permits.
The measures are intended not only to prevent further drowning deaths — there have been eight drownings in Foster-Arend’s 23 years — but to make the beach and park a more civil, well-behaved place, said Park and Recreation Department Director Ron Bastian.
“I don’t think you can measure success with fatalities,” Bastian said. The Park Board’s steps “make it a more family-friendly beach by making it a more controlled environment out there.”
Board members were not expected to close the pond, despite testimony over the winter months from Jay Hoecker, a retired Mayo Clinic pediatrician and member of the Olmsted County Public Health Advisory Committee. Hoecker told board members that former mining pits, such as Foster-Arend, are unsafe for swimming.
The wider segment of public opinion received by the Park and Recreation Department supported keeping open the pond as a free-admission swimming site, park officials said.
No member of the Park Board spoke in favor of closing the pond.
Board member Roger Nelson argued for hiring lifeguards to keep watch over the swimming area, saying that in his childhood in Bemidji, the city staffed three lake beaches with lifeguards. One time, he observed a child saved by one of the guards.
“The question in my mind is what was that worth to the city of Bemidji to have that lifeguard?” Nelson asked.
His motion, to hire lifeguards to watch the beach and security guards to patrol the pond perimeter, didn’t receive a second.
Members of the park staff said that it would be difficult to find any lifeguards, let alone the 10 of them that would be needed to adequately staff Foster-Arend, this close to the start of the season. Pond lifeguards are required to have a form of certification different than is required for swimming-pool lifeguards, and there’s no place locally to get it.
The cost to hire lifeguards was estimated at $100,000 to $125,000.
It’s undetermined how the department will pay for security guards. Bastian said he would look for ways to carve the money out of the department’s existing budget, and as a last resort ask for an extra allocation from the city’s contingency fund.
Cost concerns blocked one other idea, to place large rocks, called rip-rap, over some of the sand deposits on the north, west and south shores of the lake that are popular hangouts for people who swim outside the designated area, on the east shore of the pond.
Though the board did not adopt all of the measures it could have, regardless of cost, “if you look at the overall picture, it’s going to be tremendously better than it was,” said board member Craig Johnson.
Nelson, though his wishes for lifeguards and rip-rap did not prevail, said he was satisfied with the outcome.
“The dangerous parts are closed now,” he said. “We’re all going to be watching it.”
“We’re not out of the woods,” Nelson said, “because there’s always the possibility we have another drowning.”