Austin wades into talks on future of city pools
Bringing them all up to snuff would cost $47M, city officials estimate.
When asked what they’d like to see at Austin’s public pools, most residents stuck to the simple things: Keep the pools open at least until Labor Day. Get rid of the ants. Plant more trees for shade.
When asked to do some long-range thinking about the city’s pools, Kentucky-based consulting firm Brandstetter Carroll Inc. last year raised the possibility of sweeping changes: Close and consolidate pools. Convert pools into splash pads. Build pools that retain traditional lap lanes but also feature waterpark-like amenities.
The city’s parks department is trying to figure out what to do with its 36 pools — not counting crown jewels Barton Springs and Deep Eddy or the recently upgraded Bartholomew and Westen-
field pools — and as part of an effort that will culminate next year in a master plan, is talking to hundreds of Austin residents and has brought consulting firms on board.
Bridging the gap between the big-picture ideas of a master plan and the thoughts that bubble to the top of poolgoers’ minds still is ahead.
Consultant Laura Cortez, whose Cortez Consulting Services led a team of volunteers that surveyed 317 people at 11 city pools last month, said the team intentionally asked broad, open-ended questions such as “What do you like about city pools? What could be improved?”
“We wanted to be very respectful of the fact that we were coming into a space where people were going for personal joy,” Cortez said. “We knew we were on the heels of a conversation that had just happened in early summer about pools closing, so it was not our intention to talk about anything controversial. Our intention was to gain the trust of an individual coming with their child or family.”
After a community outcry, the parks department earlier this year reversed a decision to close Metz and Mabel Davis pools. Those closures had been planned in part to save water and money at those leaky, decades-old pools.
Many of the city’s pools are long past the usual three-decade lifespan for a pool and a handful are “not likely to survive” more than five years without major upgrades, an outside assessment completed last year said. Bringing all the pools up to snuff would cost $47 million, city officials say.
Very little of that is currently on the table in the City Council’s budget talks. Council Member Leslie Pool — who campaigned as a champion of the city’s parks, pools and libraries — is asking her colleagues to approve $1.5 million for basic repairs to Northwest Pool that would extend the pool’s life by up to a decade.
The citywide $47 mil- lion price tag means that repairing the city’s pools is a yearslong project — likely beyond the duration of the current crop of city parks officials and the present City Council, said Kimberly McNeely, an assistant director in the parks department.
McNeely said the master plan would help the city answer questions such as “Do (the pools) get rebuilt exactly as they are? Repaired? Is there some sort of combination, a way to condense the number of pools in a given area?” She continued, “I want to go on record saying I am not at all advocating for that. I don’t know what stakeholders are going to tell us.”
Cortez said she’s working on gathering comments from neighborhood associations throughout the city, and that October will be dedicated to holding more in-depth focus group conversations. In those conversations, participants would be asked questions, written with input from the consultants who will draft the master plan, that could address larger topics such as adding to pools such waterpark-like amenities as slides and lazy rivers, or building more splash pads.
Pool, who chairs the council’s Open Space, Environment and Sustainability Committee, said she doesn’t see the need for conventional swimming pools to disappear.
“I know that I’m not keen on losing the conventional swimming pools, because of the exercise you get there that you don’t get at splash pads,” Pool said.
Exiting Dick Nichols Pool in mid-August, Toni Norton took the time to bend the ear of a volunteer about, among other things, the need for more pools in Southwest Austin. A new pool should have plenty of lap lanes, a baby pool, a shallow end for younger kids and deeper parts for older kids, Norton said.
Kelly Bolerjack, who was at the pool with her three kids, ticked off what she liked about the pool: There’s no diving board, which makes it safer, and it’s close to home, which means after-work visits are easy. She also had one plea: “Keep it free,” she told a volunteer.