Public Comment

The city is considering placing a bond measure on the ballot to rebuild our public pools. Pools built nearly half a century ago, in cooperation between the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) and the city, have reached their life expectancy. Crumbling infrastructure makes these pools increasingly expensive to maintain and keep viable financially and operationally. As a result, two of the three outdoor neighborhood public pools in Berkeley are closed most of the year, with West Campus pool closed even on summer weekends. Only King pool serves its North Berkeley neighborhood year around. Additionally, the city’s Warm Water Pool, housed in Berkeley Highs Old Gym, must be relocated and rebuilt. Now is the time to look at alternative scenarios. Now is the time to explore facilities that can support existing programs and act as a springboard to launch new, exciting, aquatic programs. 

The city is considering a $30 million dollar price tag to rebuild what we have. However, what we have are pools and an aquatic program that reaches comparatively few, with diminishing utilization over the past years. The BUSD, forced to focus on No Child Left Behind and its own budget woes, has elected to align funding with academics, resulting in insufficient funding to maintain and operate the pools for school-based swim programs. What we have now is a system of pools that are owned by the schools and run by the city, that are inefficient, and require large financial subsidies for operation and for programming. 

Our pools don’t serve families with young children very well. Many children from minority families, and economically disadvantaged families, are not learning to swim. There are few and limited family swim slots and there are few programs specifically designed for teenagers. In addition, the pools are designed to old safety standards and do not accommodate deep-water activities or competitive swimming. Finally, the old engineering, lack of enclosure, and Berkeley winters, cause these facilities to be high-energy consumers and unattractive to all but the most hardy residents during the colder months. At this historical moment, we should consider the future and we should consider the needs, not only of current pool users, but all those constituents that are not currently being served by existing aquatic facilities. 

A number of us have engaged and considered these issues, weighing the pros and cons of several pool options. Using the best information available we feel that a new, multi-use, aquatic complex can be built for the same or less money than is currently being proposed for rehabilitating and replacing existing facilities. Such a complex would include a new indoor, warm water, therapeutic pool. Other elements of the complex would allow for recreation, amusement, and competition. Such a complex could potentially provide a community center for families, seniors, youth and the disabled that includes meeting rooms that can also used for birthday parties and city camps, a food concession, and opportunities for unique activities of interest to the community. 

We have seen what other cities have done both in the Bay Area and afar. For example, the Silliman Aquatic Center in Newark is enormously popular with its residents. They maintain long hours, provide joyful youth recreation, such as a tot water park and slides, have a very low subsidy per swim, and are helping teach all the children and adults of Newark to swim. We have also learned that Carson Valley Swim Center in Nevada has the best warm water therapy program of any public pool in the West, as well as many aquatic exercise programs. They also provide opportunities for competitive swimming, scuba, water polo, recreational swimming and diving. 

Our goal has been to develop a sustainable long-term pool solution for all of Berkeley’s residents, a vision of aquatics that serves the most citizens with cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency. With the need to address the crumbling infrastructure of existing facilities, now is the time to begin developing a new aquatics infrastructure and program that will serve all of Berkeley well into the future with a world-class facility. 

This commentary was written on behalf of Berkeley Aquatics for All: Charles Altekruse , James Cisney, Bill Hamilton, David Mayer, Dan McGarry, Thom Opal, Stephen Swanson, Zasa Swanson.