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The future of Berkeley’s warm water pool, a popular recreation choice for disabled residents, remains unsettled after a city study released last week found that rebuilding the current facility at Berkeley High School’s Old Gym or constructing a new one would cost between $6.3 and $7.5 milion—roughly twice the amount the city has on hand for the project. 

Public Works Director Rene Cardinaux will present the report from Glass Architects to the City Council Tuesday. City staff has requested that the council ask the school district to refrain from recommending a permanent home for a new warm water pool until the city determines its preferred location. 

Under a 1998 memorandum of understanding between the city and the district, the city accepted responsibility for maintaining the pool, while Berkeley Unified retained responsibility for maintaining the building. 

“The council needs to decide which option it wants and we need to see what we can do to get more money,” said Henry DeGrassa, manager of capital projects for the city. 

The report is the latest setback for warm water pool users, who in the four years since voters approved a $3.25 million measure to refurbish the pool have seen cost estimates skyrocket while the bond money has remained unspent. 

“I’m a little bit worried,” said Mark Hendrix, a leader of warm water pool users. “The question is can we get a new pool sometime before this building becomes so dilapidated that swimmers can’t use it anymore?” 

Some disabled residents said the warm water pool is one of the few places they can exercise. 

“I’m like a beached whale out of water, but I’m like Flipper in the pool,” said Corbett O’Toole, who had polio and rides in a wheelchair. 

Arthritis-patient Shirley Naylor said she walks out of the pool in a lot less pain than when she enters. “The warm water is the best thing for my joints,” she said. 

City officials charge that the district has neglected the Old Gym in recent years, effectively ending hope that the building could be preserved. 

“It’s deteriorated significantly over just the last three to four years,” Cardinaux said. “Problems we thought could be repaired now mean the building has to be torn down.” 

The consultant’s report found that the Old Gym was too unsafe to renovate. It also studied possibly relocating the warm water pool to the site of the current West Campus pool, but pool users are opposed to that idea since only a smaller warm water pool could fit on the site. 

Meanwhile, the school board is scheduled to vote May 11 on a plan for the southern portion of the high school campus that calls for tearing down the Old Gym and reserving a portion of the tennis courts across Milvia Street for a new pool, said Lew Jones, the school district’s facilities director. Jones said the district was under the impression that the city supported the district moving forward with the proposal to move the location of the pool. 

The benefits of the plan to build a new pool on the tennis courts site, Jones said, would be that swimmers could continue to use the current pool while the city builds the new pool across the street. However, the city doesn’t have the roughly $7 million needed to build a new pool. City Manager Phil Kamlarz has proposed allocating $1 million towards the project, which combined with the still unspent $3.25 million bond would still leave the city roughly $3 million short. 

Kamlarz said one option would be to go back to voters next year and ask for a new bond. But Councilmember Dona Spring argued that seeking voter approval would take too long and further drive up costs as the prices for steel and concrete continue to rise. 

“We can’t dilly dally anymore,” she said. “If we wait two years the pool will end up costing $10 million.” 

Spring is proposing that the city seek at least $1 million from the school district for the new pool and pay for the balance of the project through a Certificate of Participation, by which the city would borrow money and repay it within 10 years. 

Adding to the sense of urgency for warm water pool users, the pool, according to Glass Architects, “is in a state of substantial decay.” 

The building’s poor condition has led many pool advocates to conclude that the district isn’t interested in keeping the pool. 

“The BUSD has always been opposed to having people other than high school kids on the south campus,” said pool user and advocate Josephine Arasteh. 

“I do feel the district has played a waiting game to see if the building could get so decrepit that we would have to leave,” Hendrix said. 

New ceiling vents stopped working shortly after they were installed in 1999, presumably from corrosion; the new roof, installed at the same time, is unfinished and shows signs of staining; electrical conduits are exposed and recessed light fixtures and junction boxes are significantly rusted with some dangerous exposed wiring visible, the consultants found.  

Moreover, Cardinaux warned that the ceiling over an adjacent pool no longer in operation was at risk of collapsing. The roof over the warm water pool is also in subpar shape, Cardinaux said, despite the fact that the school district several years ago installed a new roof with roughly $300,000 supplied by the city. 

“I don’t think [the roof repairs] were done as well as they could have been done,” Cardinaux said, adding that the new wooden roof was never painted or finished. 

Jones said that the district had not done any significant maintenance on the Old Gym in the past few years because the school district assumed that the building would have to be torn down. “We were reluctant to spend major money when there’s uncertainty how long the building will be there,” Jones said. 

Sasha Futran, the consultant hired jointly by the city and the district to figure out how to raise money for the pool, questioned the district’s intentions from the start. 

“I don’t think the school district ever wanted to renovate that pool,” she said. Futran said that in 2000 former Superintendent Jack McLoughlin wanted the warm water pool project to be folded into the school district’s bond measure on the ballot. When Futran learned that rehabbing the pool was the district’s lowest priority project for the bond money she said she lobbied progressive councilmembers to make sure that the pool bond would be a city-funded measure, independent of the schools. 

Relations between the district and swimmers have soured since 2000. 

Shortly after the election, McLoughlin ordered the architecture firm Akol and Yoshi to draw preliminary designs of a refurbished warm water pool at the Old Gym. But according to Jones, as part of their work, the architects contracted an engineering firm that found the building might collapse in a major earthquake. 

“Their testing showed that the concrete was much weaker than we had thought,” Jones said. The report was released just as McLoughlin, long considered an advocate of the warm water pool, resigned and was replaced by current Superintendent Michele Lawrence. Facing a mounting budget deficit, Lawrence halted the project. 

“Jack didn’t have the knowledge that Michele had,” Jones said. “She wanted to have a better handle on what the district’s needs were and not run willy-nilly into a building project.”  

Although the four-year delay for additional planning has increased project costs, Jones said building a new pool across the street was “the only viable solution we know to preserve the warm water pool.” Under the district plan, Jones said the pool would be serviced by plenty of disabled parking spaces and have a wider deck. 

Jones added that he wasn’t clear if the district’s bond could pay for the new pool, and said the available funds had already been assigned to other projects. 

The warm water pool serves students as well and is the primary gym option for disabled students. If the district needed a temporary home for student swimmers, Berkeley YMCA Director Fran Gallati said the Downtown Y, which has three swimming pools, could accommodate the students, and possibly the adults as well, if the district pool closed for rebuilding on the same site or elsewhere.?