Can we afford them? That’s the way County Executive Scott Walker is coaching his argument that pools need to be closed but this time he’s approaching his pool closing scheme in a different way.

Last time he closed the pools in the heat of the summer and the public was outraged. Walker scapegoated former Parks Director Sue Baldwin and even orchestrated a media circus by alerting the media before Baldwin even knew she was to be fired.

This time he’s floating the idea that pools will likely be closed next summer so the pools would never even open — therefore the public wouldn’t feel they had been taken away.

That being said, there is some validity in the argument that some of the pools ought to be closed. Simply put, some are rarely used and the pool census is very low. Recreation has taken a turn over the past decade and swimming is no longer a priority of parents. The sad part of this is that many kids not only don’t have a big interest in swimming, but that they’ll still play around water including park lagoons. This past winter, two young boys who were playing near a lagoon fell in and a huge community wide search was instituted to find them. Months later they were found at the bottom of the lagoon.

Deep water pools no longer have the same appeal. As a child, one of the fun games we would play at Kosciusko pool, Jackson Park pool and Pulaski pool was to drop items down to the bottom of the pool (pennies, goggles, little rocks) and dive down to pick them up in the 12 foot deep area. Kids don’t seem to have an interest in doing that anymore and the deep end of the pools just aren’t as popular as they once were.

Splash pads and zero depth entry pools are the rage now and Parks Director Sue Black wants to build a new waterpark somewhere on the northern half of the county to meet the demand. Unfortunately, one of the existing waterparks that does get good usage is Pelican Cove — the waterpark that replaced one of my favorite childhood pools in Kosciusko Park on Milwaukee’s south side.

The justification for closing the pool appears to be that it doesn’t make money.

There’s no shock there — the area around Kosciusko Park isn’t an area of great affuence but it is unfair to expect that all park facilities should make money. Residents of that neighorhood pay taxes too and those taxes are already paying for the pool. If anything, Park officials should look to reduce the cost of using the pool so that more kids can use the pool. Experimenting with free times, perhaps the first half hour the pool is open, should also be looked at to drive up the census. Having grown up on the south side in a large family, I can appreciate that many struggling families may not be able to afford the admission fee to these pools. When I was a kid it was just 25 cents to use the pool.
Interestingly enough, Walker while Walker has not learned the good citizenship lesson from his pool closing fiasco of the past, he has learned the political lesson. This time he is careful to put the face of Parks Director Sue Black in front of the public. It’s Walker’s version of using a human shield in front of him in order to divert attention to the person who is really pulling the strings.

So we’ll see whether Walker is successful in stripping away pools from the public. He appears to have learned that you can’t take them away from the public — the question now is whether you can make it so they never even open.