Floating Bonds for Pools

Jon Mukri was a boy in 1957 when a sparkling new swimming pool opened at the Mar Vista Recreation Center, not far from his house. Mukri learned the breast stroke there; he hung out with buddies on stifling July afternoons. Even now, the timbre of his voice changes from formal bureaucrat to gosh-shucks kid when he remembers those summers poolside.

Mukri is now general manager of Los Angeles’ Department of Recreation and Parks, overseeing 387 city parks and 59 pools. These days, the Mar Vista pool saddens him. The locker room where generations stowed cutoffs and flip-flops in mesh bags is dark and dingy. The lifeguards’ office and first aid station is cramped and grimy. And for years, until the current director twisted arms to replace missing wooden letters, the sign over the pool house door read “MING POOL.”

As outdated and shabby as it is, Mar Vista’s pool is in better shape than many in the city. At least it will open next month. Six city pools will stay empty and chained shut -- too decrepit, leaky or unsafe to fill. They are the Gaffey Pool in San Pedro, Northridge and Lanark pools in the San Fernando Valley, Harvard Pool in South Los Angeles, the Echo Park pool near downtown, and the E.G. Roberts Pool in the mid-city area, which is expected to open in August after a renovation. Several other pools will be open on a day-to-day basis, depending on whether the filtering and other equipment can be kick-started.

The swimming pool is so much a Los Angeles icon that the picture often seen of this city is an aerial view splashed with thousands of twinkling turquoise oases. But millions of children and adults sweat out summers in stuffy apartments or on crackling-dry ball fields. City pools are one of the few places they can cool off, and this year many won’t have that option.

With the city’s budget as unforgiving as August heat, the estimated $180 million it would take to install new pool filters and water heaters and to re-pipe and rebuild dozens of outdated pools is not in the cards.

Mukri’s only alternative may be a bond measure, words he almost whispers, perhaps fearing that tax-weary voters will slap their sides and laugh: “A bond measure for pools? Now that’s a good one!”

Mukri shouldn’t be so timid. Voter-passed bond measures between 1923 and 1957 financed construction of most of the city’s 59 pools, once the envy of other municipalities. Visionary taxpayers also pledged $178.3 million through a 1998 bond measure that has rebuilt nearly half of the city’s 68 branch libraries -- almost all on time and on budget.

This summer, too many children will have to settle for a trickling garden hose or the Slip ‘n’ Slide on a neighbor’s front lawn. But perhaps by next year, bold leaders will have outlined a plan that, with voter support, will let more kids into the water.