Just as the temperature climbs, Texas towns are closing public pools to cut costs

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — With the bright sun shining down over them, kids and teenagers in Mae Simmons Park cooled off Monday, zig-zagging through sprinklers at one of the city’s new splash pads.

The relief couldn’t come soon enough. Like the rest of Texas, it’s been a hot summer in Lubbock. Residents have already endured temperatures of more than 100 degrees.

Two years ago, the city had four public pools for kids and adults to stave off the blistering heat. Now, none are open. Instead, the most populous city on the South Plains debuted three long-awaited splash pads this week — including this one in Mae Simmons, feet away from where the old pool had been covered by dirt and rocks like a grave.

While dozens of children may have enjoyed the new attraction, the grand opening was marred by backlash. Long-time Lubbock residents are upset the city has been unable to upkeep its pools.

“There were lots of mistakes over time that led us here,” said Adam Hernandez, a community advocate.

Lubbock is not the only Texas city going without a beloved community pool during a scorching summer. About 473 miles across the state in Longview, residents are facing a similar fate — and fighting it. The demolition of yet another public swimming pool in lieu of paying for costly repairs kicked off the region’s hottest months.

Razing of the Longview Swim Center began this month, leaving one public pool option for a city of 80,000 people. It is the third pool abandoned and demolished by the city in the last 20 years and comes after the city stopped providing swimming lessons in 2020.

Lubbock and Longview are just two examples seen across Texas where the cost of providing a public pool has outpaced the ability of local municipalities to pay for them. Once considered a form of necessary community infrastructure that commanded millions of federal dollars nationwide, swimming pools across Texas and the U.S. are closing in swathes. Pools that have long foregone necessary maintenance are now too costly to repair, so cities are demolishing them.

The closure of these public pools goes against national standards. Data from the National Recreation and Park Association suggests cities with populations up to 250,000 commonly have at least four pools.

Splash pads are becoming the cheaper alternative — they require less maintenance and staff. For the most part, residents say they aren’t against the splash pads, but they don’t fill the gaps left by abandoned swimming pools. And splash pads don’t appeal to all age groups and they can be less accessible to differently-abled individuals.

In their heyday, Lubbock’s city-owned pools were the ideal outing for residents. Clapp Pool was the largest and most popular — nearly 20,000 residents visited the pool every year, according to city data.

This summer, the pool is an empty relic from Lubbock’s past. The pools were centrally located, open from May to August, and affordable. But after being built in the 1950s, the four pools had all significantly deteriorated — Maxey, Mae Simmons, and Montelongo were past the point of no return.

In 2022, city leaders voted to close those pools and replace them with the pads, citing costly repairs. In April, it was announced the city’s only remaining pool, Clapp, would not open this summer, because it also needed repairs.

Hernandez says the root of the problem was neglect. In 2022, a city report highlighted some of the problems — outdated filter systems, unreliable draining, diving board structures that needed to be replaced entirely. The same report found that 66% of residents who responded to a survey said they did not use the city pools for various reasons.

Lubbock’s pools were in such disrepair that they would have to be rebuilt entirely. Armed with funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, city leaders decided to invest $5.1 million to replace the Montelongo, Maxey, and Mae Simmons pools with splash pads. The parks also got new playground equipment to go with the pads.

Jarrett Atkinson, Lubbock’s city manager, said he hopes there’s a wider conversation about ways to have a pool in the future.

A splash pad “doesn’t replace a pool,” Atkinson said. “But we have something now.”

There are other benefits to the splash pads, Atkinson said. They’ll be open for eight months of the year, all have unique and different features, and the water is recycled through the pads after it’s sterilized. They also don’t require staff, a growing problem across the U.S. According to the American Lifeguard Association, one-third of the remaining 309,000 public swimming pools nationwide remained closed in 2023 as a result of low staffing.

The biggest benefit — the splash pads are free to the public.

Hernandez said splash pads are great and provide family bonding for parents with young children. Anyone older than 10 years old, Hernandez said, would likely not have as much fun.

“It’s not the same as a pool or a mixed-use water park with a wave pool or lazy river,” Hernandez said.

Pools are something that people can enjoy regardless of how much money they make. In a community like Lubbock, where more than 18% of households are impoverished and 26% live paycheck to paycheck, these spaces are important, Hernandez said. There are other places to swim, but they either require a membership or the admission is too high for some to afford.

Not all cities have abandoned their public pools. In fact, some small towns near Lubbock have managed to keep their pools open.

Littlefield, a town about 37 miles northwest of Lubbock, has an aquatic center for their 6,000 residents. And Plainview, a town of 20,000, has an aquatic center.

“Cities with much smaller tax bases are able to provide these,” said Hernandez in Lubbock. “So the excuse that it’s too expensive doesn’t hold water.”

Kamie Herrera took her four young children to the Longview Swim Center in East Texas often. The small business owner saw the center as a safe place for her kids, who are between 4 to 12 years old, to release energy during the summer.

Longview does have several splash pads as alternatives to swimming pools, but for a family like Herrera’s, they’re not really an option, she said. One of her children is differently abled and nonverbal. Two are too old to enjoy a splash pad.

“It’s really hard that they’re just abandoning pools without a plan to replace them,” Herrera said.

The closure of Longview’s Swim Center felt as if it was rushed and done without community input, which bothered Herrera, she said.

The discussion about closing Longview’s aquatics center began about this time last year. New to the job, John Albertson, director of Longview Parks and Recreation, brought in an outside engineering firm to diagnose problems in the pool and determine a cost for repair before presenting options to the Longview City Council.

The engineering firm found problems with the shell and gutter systems which would have presented risks for swimmers this summer if the pool opened.

Albertson provided four options to deal with the pool ranging from abandonment and demolition, making minor repairs to a complete remodel of the swim center. The city council chose to abandon and demolish the pool for $150,000 – the least expensive option.

“This would allow us the option to look at other locations and build an aquatics master plan,” Albertson said.

Public pools rose in popularity to stem water-related deaths. The Longview Swim Center was the last of four pools built from the 1950s to the 1970s as part of the nation’s effort to reduce incidents of drowning. Their swim program taught many Longview residents to swim until 2020 when the city was forced to stop the swim program because of COVID-19, Albertson said.

As pools have closed, drownings have risen, according to the Centers for Disease Control. More than 4,500 people drowned each year from 2020-2022 — 500 more people per year compared to reports from 2019 and earlier.

CDC data found that drowning was a leading cause of death for children between 1 and 4 years old, and more than 40 million adults don’t know how to swim. American Indian and Alaskan Native people had the highest rates of drowning, while Black people had the second highest rates.

The agency’s number one recommendation: increase access to swimming lessons.

In some communities, they’re too expensive, and in others, they simply don’t exist. There are also social barriers to learning to swim, stemming from a longstanding history of racism that surrounds public pools.

“Understanding the barriers people face to accessing basic swimming and water safety skills training can help us better understand how to address those barriers, decrease drowning rates, and save lives,” said Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, in a statement released with the report.

On Tuesday, the Longview City Council deliberated the future of aquatics in the city. Albertson has suggested the city create a plan that would require resident insight. If approved, the process of writing a plan would take around eight months to a year to complete and would provide a basis for future investments.

“We all realize the importance of allowing the public to have their voice heard through that process,” Albertson said.

The City Council is expected to vote Thursday on using $3.5 million for a new pool.

Back in Lubbock, at the grand opening of the splash pads, Darcus Phenix, director of Lubbock’s Boys and Girls Club, brought out more than 30 of the kids in the program.

“All kids want to do in the summer is play basketball and swim,” said Darcus Phenix, with Boys and Girls Club of Lubbock. “They’re not swimming, but look how happy they are.”

Phenix said the splash pads will be where they spend their weekly field trips from now on.

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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.