Sean Anderson and Maria Coryell-Martin brace for a chilly swim in Lake Washington. Coryell-Martin and other activists are pushing the city to renovate and add to the public pool system in Seattle.
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For more information about how to have your say in the push for a Comprehensive Aquatics Plan for the north and south ends of the city, contact Project Seattle Pools Team Coordinator Elizabeth Nelson at Elizabeth@seattlepools.org.
The economic crisis and tightening Seattle city budgets make it impossible to fund a $225,000 Comprehensive Aquatics Plan in the 2009 budget, according to the council’s chief proponent, Councilman Tom Rasmussen.
The advocacy group, Project Seattle Pools, has stopped its lobbying efforts on behalf of the plan. The group’s director, Elizabeth Nelson, says members will re-group and plan for next year’s efforts in the next few months.
The city of Seattle has built only one pool in 30 years and provides only 1.7 pools per 100,000 citizens, far below the national average of three pools per 100,000 residents, according to figures compiled by the Trust for Public Land. Two of Seattle’s pools are outdoors – Mounger, and Colman Pool in West Seattle, both west of Interstate 5.
“Our city has not kept up with the times. Whenever you have long wait lists (three to 12 years) and expensive fees to join private clubs ($2,000-$25,000), swimming becomes an exclusive activity,” says Christine Larsen, a Capitol Hill mother of three.
She used to get in line at 5 a.m. to try to get her children into 9 a.m. swim lessons at a private pool in Wedgwood. If she were a member, she’d have no problem, but she’s been on the waiting list for seven years and has five years to go. In the summer of 2007, she drove her children, ages 2, 4 and 7, across town to the outdoor Mounger Pool in Magnolia, but wasn’t able to enroll them in swim lessons.
That summer, she began an effort to get another outdoor pool in northeast Seattle, and arranged meetings with representatives of Seattle Parks and Recreation at local community centers in the fall of 2007. As she researched the issue, she saw a need for outdoor pools in southeast Seattle, as well as other areas of the city. After becoming a park commissioner later in the fall, Larsen turned over leadership of the organization to Elizabeth Nelson, who has broadened the scope of the effort.
Nelson grew up in northeast Seattle and swam at a private pool in View Ridge. She overcame health challenges and says, “Swimming was a refuge when normal activities were difficult to do, and one of the most important things I did growing up to keep me healthy was to learn to swim.” She now lives near University Village and finds fewer opportunities available: The waiting list for the View Ridge pool she used as a child is now 946 people long, and only about 10 families were taken off the wait list this year.
“Cost-effectiveness is a selling point for outdoor pools,” Nelson says, pointing to the success of Mounger Pool. “Kids don’t want to go indoors in summer – they want to access swimming through play.” In addition, she says Project Seattle Pools represents the population that needs more pool space for therapy, noting that there is no public, graduated-entry pool in the whole city. She also cites the need for pool space for swim teams that must sometimes practice before 5 a.m. “There is an overall lack of pool space for all ages and all abilities.”
The group was instrumental in persuading the City Council to fund a preliminary outdoor pool feasibility study, released in June 2008. Key findings included:
• Modern pools, like Mounger and Montlake Terrace pools, recover much of their operating costs in admission charges, and so are not a big drain on the parks system. They offer a variety of water activities, thus appealing to a broad cross section of the population.
• Seattle’s existing outdoor pools have exceptionally high attendance rates.
• Kids are being turned away from lessons due to a lack of capacity: "For youth-oriented programs, both outdoor facilities are at capacity with significant wait lists at Mounger pool." Also: "Parks programs at all pools generally have full enrollment and wait lists for classes."
• “Swimming has the second highest levels of participation, second only to walking” according to a 2006 report about sports participation in Seattle, Washington state and other western states.
• More than 2,000 families have signed up for multi-year waitlists at private pools. Wedgwood and View Ridge charge $50 just to join their wait lists while membership costs thousands of dollars a year. View Ridge and other private pools require members to live within certain neighborhood boundaries, so they aren’t accessible to most city residents.
• There is also an “obvious gap in the Beacon Hill/North Rainier Valley” for pools of any sort – indoor or outdoor.
• City-owned sites of interest include: Jefferson Park, Magnuson Park, the to-be-decommissioned Roosevelt reservoir and the Northgate Park-n-Ride lot.
Costumed members and supporters of Project Seattle Pools testified on behalf of pools and a comprehensive aquatics plan at an Oct. 8 city budget hearing – before finding out that the plan could not be funded, due to budget constraints.
“Modernizing our city’s aging public pool system will provide health benefits to citizens of all ages and abilities, but will require careful long-term planning,” Nelson testified. She added that nine out of the city’s 10 public pools were built more than 30 years ago, kids are being turned away from swimming lessons and many of the pools are “packed to the gills.”
Yvette Moy of Southeast Seattle reminded the councilmembers that Seattle Parks and Recreation has acknowledged that the Jefferson/Rainier Valley area is “underserved” when it comes to pools. Two high school swimmers told the council that the shortage of pool space forces them to get up at 4:30 a.m. to practice with their teams.
Wenda Reed is a Bothell writer, mother of two and frequent contributor to Seattle’s Child.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES: This update of a story that first ran in our January 2008 magazine.
