COEUR d’ALENE — Offshore businesses got the boot this week from a Coeur d’Alene board whose members unanimously elected to sink any new proposals.

The city’s Parks and Recreation Committee at its meeting this week chose not to create commercial offshore water-based business opportunities within its jurisdiction — the corridor within 1,000 feet from the city’s shoreline.

Safety was the concern most voiced by committee members and parks and recreation director Bill Greenwood.

Too many people use the shore area for swimming, kayaking and paddle boarding, committee vice chair Mike McDowell said. Having in the mix motorized vessels ferrying clients back and forth from shore to waterborne businesses seemed dangerous.

McDowell used as an example the Hooligan Island jungle gym barge that bobbed off City Beach for part of the summer.

“There’s been an increase of people with personal floatation devices (at City Beach), so they are out much farther than they were 10 years ago,” McDowell said. “Having a motorized (boat) carrying people back and forth, it just looked like an accident waiting to happen to me.”

The board has been wrestling over the past few years with waterborne business requests from floating fun centers to hovercraft businesses, but the city had no ordinance to address the proposals, in part because it hadn’t considered their potential.

A push last spring to address the issue was postponed until this month.

Parks and Rec committee members considered a motion by Christie Wood to pull the plug on future proposals — most of them requested setting up near City Park and its beach.

“I’ve got some very serious reservations on how to make something like that, in that location, a safe operation,” McDowell said. “It looks like if it were out there by itself away from other traffic it would be a real fun operation, but in that location, that’s the last thing we need to have there.”

Offshore businesses would require on-shore booths to sell tickets, which would most likely require use of public space. Additionally, committee members mulled, the operations must be monitored. City police have no boat, and although it has a boat to douse fires at waterfront properties, the fire department lacks resources to baby-sit businesses.

“How to create a use that would be good for the city, its citizens and good for the vendor … that’s the rub,” Greenwood said. “I haven’t been able to get my head wrapped around how to create that.”

Wood’s motion not to create an opportunity for waterborne businesses in the city’s aquatic corridor was unanimously passed and the City Council will be apprised this month of the committee’s decision.