Willow Glen Resident
News
Biebrach Pool will stay closed; high school pools to be rented
By Mayra Flores De Marcotte
After months of studies and data collection, the Gardner community's demands are the same--the residents want their pool back.
At the Feb. 27 San Jose City Council meeting, more than 20 residents representing the Gardner and downtown communities told the council they weren't interested in frills or anything splashy, just their basic pools.
Gardner's Biebrach pool was one of four city pools closed in 2005.
The closed facility, with its six-lane, 25-yard pool, is the largest of all the recreational swimming facilities. The city wanted to capitalize on that. Officials found the idea attractive because Beibrach has the largest service area, including Washington, Willow Glen, Palm Haven, North Willow Glen, Gardner, Tamien and Midtown.
At the Jan. 24 meeting, San Jose Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services deputy director Cynthia Bojorquez presented residents from the affected neighborhoods with six options for their pools, from the repair and enhancement of the three pools still open to customizing and adding facilities according to the needs of each community. These alternatives range in cost from $1.4 million to $39 million and include proposals for a water-spray park with no pool to an indoor competitive venue.
No extras, the residents said, just a place for their children to get wet in and enjoy during the hot days of summer.
"The city is just showing us something that we can't have," said Gardner Advisory Council president Rudy Martinez. "San Jose is about community. We just want our pool back."
The city's six pools were built between the 1930s and 1970s, and are of standard rectangular form, with the exception of downtown's Ryland. In 2005, the San Jose City Council voted to close four of them, including Biebrach Pool, due to safety and health code violations and inadequate revenue streams.
The fourth, Mayfair, was approved for renovations in August 2006.
Until the four closed pools are brought up to standard, however, the community will have to go through another summer without a pool.
To help during the transition, the city council unanimously approved the rental of six school sites for this summer to accommodate the communities. These pools sites are at Santa Teresa, Silver Creek, Del Mar and Piedmont high schools and Peter Burnett and Willow Glen middle schools, Bojorquez said. The community pools at Camden and Fair will remain open as well.
San Jose Unified School District property consultant Sonja Shurr said the district is still negotiating with the city on scheduling issues.
The costs for renting the school facilities, however, are still the same. The district charges $46 an hour for use of its pools along with a minimum three-hour custodial fee at $38.48 an hour, which goes toward cleaning and maintaining the pool, restrooms and locker rooms.
Bojorquez said a primary cause of the pools' deterioration has been a lack of maintenance, and the citywide master plan is the first step in ensuring this does not happen again.
The process for the citywide master plan was broken into three phases. The first was data collection, in which consultant Scott Hunsaker's firm, Counsilman-Hunsaker, received a $250,000 city contract to assess residents' aquatic needs. This phase was completed in October 2006. The second phase was taking data collected in the first phase to draw up a conceptual master plan.
The third phase consists of the final report and will be presented to the city council in June.
Bojorquez said because the city plans to rent pools this summer, there will be 40 job openings, including lifeguards and assistant pool managers.
For more information, contact 408. 277.2291.
