Surfers Seek Space

Surfers who ride waves in Long Beach will join together Tuesday and present the City Council with a proposal to continue a program that expands designated surfing beaches.

The Long Beach Surfers Association will file a formal recommendation regarding safer and more efficient surfing spaces, as well as proposed surfing beach schedule for the summer of 2012, according to the council’s March 6 agenda.  

Last summer the city launched a pilot program after surfers and city officials approached then City Manager Charles Theofan to expand surfing beaches, particularly on a rotation schedule in the West End where surfing was not permitted. They had warned that as the sport’s popularity grows locally and the beaches become more crowded with surfers, the city need to spread them out from the existing surfing beaches in the middle of town and East End.

Billy Kupferman, a member of the Surfers Association’s board of directors, echoed these warnings when he spoke about the surfing beaches at the Jan. 17 council meeting. “We have to realize that times have changed,” Kupferman said. “The number of surfers here is growing by the day, even in the winter. We cannot continue to force our community members, our children and anyone who pays to use our beach to surf in overcrowded and unsafe conditions. There are a lot of people who are angry and eventually someone will get hurt.”  

Kupferman said that the Surfers Association, which meets monthly at schools throughout Long Beach, had talked with and considered the recommendations of its members, council members, Chief of Lifeguards Paul Gillespie, and the community at large about these conditions as they drafted a proposal.  

Marvin Weiss, a vice chairman of the Surfer Riders Foundation, a surfing school, thanked the council for their support on this issue and recalled when he joined hundreds of fellow surfers in a rally at City Hall during the 1970s. “...We came up just in order to get Lincoln Beach [to be designated a surfing beach],” said Weiss, who was a Republican candidate for City Council last November. “And that was a big, big effort.”

The Surfers Association’s website says that the organization was formed in 2011 with the mission to “provide a unified voice for the surf community and help insure public policy appropriately addresses the needs of our large and vibrant community.”