Good morning!
The beach at Kitsilano is jammed now that warm weather is finally here. But the pool just up from the ocean, an oasis three times the size of a normal swimming pool and with stunning views of Vancouver’s downtown and North Shore mountains, is a gigantic empty tub.
Two years ago, a winter storm pummelled the 43-year-old Kitsilano pool with seawater and wood debris, seriously damaging it. The concrete panels that line the pool’s floor had heaved.
Still, the city of Vancouver was able to repair it enough to have it opened for a shortened season in 2022 and for the full season last year. While devotees have been hoping the city would figure out how to have the pool open for more than three or four months a year, they didn’t realize the pool was in an advancing state of decrepitude, and it was not on the city’s priority maintenance list.
Late in June, the city announced the pool would be closed for this year and possibly for good. An outcry ensued, pushing Mayor Ken Sim to announce new information had concluded the pool could reopen on Aug. 7. But its future remains uncertain.
As Frances Bula writes the pool’s plight is a message about the city’s state of health overall, one that other Canadian cities have heard the past few months as major pieces of infrastructure or community attractions – from Calgary’s main water pipe to the Ontario Science Centre – have broken down or been declared unusable.
Even with Sim’s last-minute rescue, critics of the city’s management say the saga of the Kits pool shows how nice-to-have infrastructure gets pushed down the maintenance priority list until it causes a public uproar.
“It makes it sound as if the city is in decline – it doesn’t have the money to keep a pool open,” said Brennan Bastyovanszky, the chair of the Vancouver Park board.
Frances had a look at city reports, memos and repair contracts from the past two years to try to get an idea of how the pool could have reached this state.
The 2022 storm was severe, but repairs meant it could still be filled for two seasons. What wasn’t clear until recently, though, was that as repairs were made and cracks filled, other cracks appeared. It’s now estimated that when filled, the pool leaks up to 1.7 million litres a day.
Vancouver has an elected park board, the only one of its kind in the country. The board looks after the city’s parks, but in 2014, the city took over legal responsibility for maintenance of park buildings. Park board advocates say that meant park infrastructure joined the urgent jumble of maintenance requirements at all kinds of aging buildings.
Kits pool, which has up to 200,000 visitors in a year over its short season, was hardly mentioned as a priority at all in city reports dating from 2022. In fact, it took city staff two years to respond to a request by city council for information on what it would take to repair the pool and to protect it against future extreme weather.
The response, issued just last month, indicated $5-million was needed for repairs and capital maintenance, along with a feasibility study. So far, only a contract of $37,000, awarded this past February, has been issued to address the matter.
That got turbocharged this month, though, after public outcry at news of the closing. Sim, who has worked to rescue other imperilled Vancouver attractions (the Stanley Park train, the Jericho pier), said the failure to deal with the pool damage is a result of having two different entities – the city and the park board – manage facilities. He said it’s more proof the park board should be abolished.
He declined to comment on whether the city also dropped the ball.
Among the pool’s many fans, Anthony Abrahams doesn’t really care who is to blame. He just wants it fixed or the city to commit to an even better alternative, one that could be open all year.
“Not having Kits pool open is a real issue,” he said. “This is a globally recognized pool. It’s more of an experience than just a pool.”
This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.