A task force will analyze a report on the state of the city’s pool system that took city staff four years to produce, Austin City Council decided Thursday.
The Aquatics Master Plan, a report on the city’s pool system that took city staff four years to produce and had over 13,000 people weigh in, said the health of many of the city’s pools was quickly waning and it would cost $193 million to fix.
Without fixing the pools, closures are imminent, the report said. The plan’s recommendation prioritized which failing pools should receive funding for rehabilitation. Many council members were taken aback that some of the city’s most iconic pools fell to the bottom of that list, leading some to call it a “decommission report.”
On Thursday, the Austin City Council voted 10-0 to create a four-member task force made of Parks and Recreation Board members to take a deeper look into the plan’s recommendations and make recommendations of their own.
Some residents and council members said the creation of a task force would only “kick the ball down the court” on making tough decisions regarding the city’s pools.
“What I’m worried about is that 13,000 people weighed in over three years and now this is going to go to four people to bring back a decision to you all,” said Alan Pease, a member of the city’s aquatics board. “What your real problem is that you need a lot of money, and no one wants to close their pools. It doesn’t matter whether you want to close the pools. … Every year pools close, and pools will fail next year.”
District 9 Council Member Kathie Tovo, who sponsored the resolution to create the task force, said she understood the concerns about public engagement but that the plan is long—154 pages—and the Parks and Recreation Board needs more time with it. The board was given the report 24 hours before they were required to vote on it at the end of July. They declined to approve the plan.
“When you have pools like Big Stacy, like Little Stacy, like Deep Eddy—some of our most popular, most highly used pools in the city [that] result in a low ranking because of their ability to be adapted, expanded … renovated, that suggests that we may need to look at that criteria a little differently and factor in some other considerations,” Tovo said.
District 2 Council Member Delia Garza added an amendment that requires the task force to provide recommendations on which pools to close.