Beaches Should Open Despite Coronavirus: NYC Council Health Chair

NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Council health chair called on city officials Saturday to develop a plan to keep beaches open for the summer to offer New Yorkers a safe way to spend time outdoors during the summer despite the continued presence of the coronavirus in the city.

City Councilmember Mark Levine — whose district represents parts of Harlem, Washington Heights and the Upper West Side — said that beaches can provide a safe outdoor space for New Yorkers when temperatures begin to rise for the summer. If beaches remain closed, cooped up New Yorkers may try to beat the heat in unsafe ways, Levine said Saturday.

"New Yorkers will likely have no access to summer camps, street fairs, and possibly even playgrounds," Levine said in a statement. "I am concerned that we are setting ourselves up for unsafe levels of lack of compliance with social distancing measures. We need to give New Yorkers a safety valve to get outside in the hot summer months. Beaches are the best place to do that."

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The city should develop a plan to enforce safe social distancing measures and gathering size limits at beaches for the summer, Levine said. This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that city pools would not be funded in the city budget, but did not make a definitive statement on beaches.

"We can't give you a plan to open the beaches because we don't know what's going to happen going forward. I would love it if we had sustained good news and progress and we could drive down those cases to such a small number that then the day could come where we could open the beaches. That would be amazing. But I'm trying to be honest with New Yorkers that I can't see that yet because we don't have the facts to back it up," de Blasio said during a Friday news conference.

The mayor also touched on the topic during a Friday appearance on WNYC, saying that the city is "not in a position to open [beaches] on schedule." The beach season in New York City begins on Memorial Day, which falls on Monday, May 25 this year.

Councilmember Levine said in a statement that the size of New York City's beaches — about 14 miles in total — should be adequate to limit socializing among beachgoers. The local lawmaker warned that if any municipality in the New York area keeps it beaches closed for the summer, it may incentivize people to travel and swarm the beaches that are eventually opened.

"Let’s find a way to do this safely. Let’s develop a responsible plan to keep our beaches open for New Yorkers this summer," Levine said in a statement.

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