by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach City Council received two proposed plans Tuesday night for the redesign of Begg Pool. One would work with the existing structures and bring the aging pool complex up to date, keeping its shallow, 25-yard pool. The other would create a modern, new aquatics center, adding a 35-meter competition style second pool, along with a 25-yard pool.
The price tags attached to each proposal, however, were larger than anticipated. The first proposal would cost $28 million and the second $40 million.
“We know the biggest challenge with either option will be the cost, which ranges from $28 million to over $40 million,” Melissa McCollum, the City’s senior recreation manager, told the council. “At the same time, doing nothing is not a viable long-term option if we want to continue to have a pool. The existing facilities are in disrepair and have a finite useful life.”
A third option also emerged. City Manager Bruce Moe told the council that Bay Club is interested in building a pool facility on a City parking lot adjacent to its Manhattan Beach Country Club property on Rosecrans Avenue. Moe said discussions on this possibility will occur in early June.
“Preliminarily, they’ve said they would be interested in building the pool and maintaining it and giving us a substantial amount of public access to it,” Moe said. “Details need to be worked out, however. I mention this because obviously we don’t have funds available right now to even do option one, and so it’s very intriguing that perhaps the Bay Club would be willing to build us a facility that could be available for the community. Again, the devil will be in the details.”
Given the uncertainty around that possibility, the council discussed the other two options. The issue of Begg Pool has bedeviled councils for over a decade, due both to the costs of building new pools and resistance from nearby residents, leery of adding more activity in the area. The nearly 70-year-old community pool, which is on land owned by the Manhattan Beach Unified School District but operated by the City in a joint-use agreement, is located adjacent to Polliwog Park. The facility has become increasingly dilapidated and outdated, including cracks appearing in its decks, a small and grungy equipment room, and a single-lane road to and from the heavily-used facility. A community survey conducted two years ago found community support for a modernized aquatics center, with 56 percent of residents approving the general idea of a new aquatics center. In that survey, 81 percent favored a larger, 35-meter pool for swim competitions, and exercise, and 73 percent favored a smaller, shallower pool for swim lessons, water aerobics, and children’s programming.
Parks and Recreation director Mark Leyman told the Council Tuesday night that the existing pool cannot keep up with community demands for programming.
“As Council is aware, there’s a large demand for swim programs within the community,” Leyman said. “We open up registration, they fill immediately. There have been previous efforts to evaluate Begg Pool. Those were made in 2008 and 2015, however, those did not proceed due to funding and other concerns.”
Last August, the Council contracted the HMC Group to prepare designs for both options. At Tuesday’s meeting, Brad Glassick, the managing partner from HMC, presented the designs to the Council. He said at the community outreach events HMC and the City conducted, one thing came through loud and clear.
“There’s just not enough water space in the city of Manhattan Beach to satisfy all the needs from recreational and other groups and the needs of the adjacent junior high school. A larger pool or pools, they don’t know. What [they know] is that we need more water.”
The resultant designs, Glassick said, cohered the specific character of this community.
“The inspiration for designing a facility in the city of Manhattan Beach is really to take your context,” he said. “For every aquatics project, we always talk about water, right? To be inspired by the water, and what it’s doing for you. But it’s really unique here in Manhattan Beach because you don’t just have pool water nearby. You have an ocean. It’s your culture. The waves, the dunes, the reflection of that. And so those were some of the things that started to inspire us to create a facility that would really be tailored to what Manhattan Beach is and what you are.”
The first option keeps the existing pool and building, but drastically transforms both, including a reconfigured layout inside and a renovated, more modern aesthetic outside. In the second option, everything would be new, including the two pools, a 7,100 sq. ft. aquatic building that includes a lifeguard training room, and more deck space.
Council discussion centered around the costs.
Councilperson Steve Napolitano said the City has many competing infrastructure needs, including a proposed outdoor dining program that would cost $20 million and a $30 million parking structure.
“We can’t necessarily afford to do all of them, certainly not all of them quickly,” he said. “So we can talk about that, but do people want to bond themselves? Do people want a $40 million pool?”
Napolitano said that while the survey two years ago found community support for a Begg Pool redesign, that survey did not come with a price tag attached.
“Yes, there’s support for a pool,” he said. “But sometimes people want an expensive car, but then they realize they can only afford this car, or they only want to pay for that car. I think this requires we ask the residents again, ‘Okay, a pool, yes, but at what cost?’”
A few residents, during public comment, suggested minor repairs on the existing facility. Councilperson Richard Montgomery said the time for repairs is gone. He noted that when he was on the council in 2006, they spent $350,000 on repairs, and suggested that $500,000 or more has been spent since, but now the pool has simply reached the end of its life.
“It’s functionally obsolete,” he said. “It fails. Fails.”
Mayor Pro Tem Amy Howorth said that the pool is both obsolete and fails to meet the needs of residents.
“We need not just some patches but a new pool.” she said. “And let’s also remember that we need more water. There is registration that opens at 6 a.m., it’s full by 6:03 a.m. Or maybe it’s an exaggeration, let’s say by 7 a.m. it is full for classes for the summer. That’s not acceptable in our community. We pride ourselves on being athletic and water safe for the ocean. We have Olympians who come from this community.”
Howorth made a motion that the City conduct a new poll that would determine levels of support among residents for spending on a new pool and other infrastructure needs.
“It’s not just a survey,” she said. “It’s a political poll to see what’s the community’s will. What a poll would do is help us understand the community’s appetite for certain things. Because we’ve talked in this chamber before about outdoor dining, $20 million to widen sidewalks and rejuvenate the downtown. That’s a lot of money. A new parking garage, $30 million. That’s a lot of money… And you may end up figuring out there’s a big appetite for this and not this, so we would act on that data.”
The motion passed unanimously. City officials will meet with Bay Club representatives June 6 to discuss the option of building a pool adjacent to their facility. ER
