SIDE STREETS: It's sink or swim time for Friends of Aquatics' effort to rescue city pools

Friends of Aquatics has been keeping swimmers afloat for years. Now it's trying to throw a lifeline to the pools, too.

The Colorado Springs nonprofit pays for poor kids to learn to swim and subsidizes specialty swim classes for seniors, handicapped and others at public pools.

Now, the Friends group feels like salmon returning home to spawn. The group is racing a 90-day deadline to stop the City Council from pulling the plug on swimming pools — two indoor facilities, four outdoor summer pools and the Prospect Lake beach.

Friends leaders Deb Barry and Daisy Chun Rhodes are searching for grants and organizing fundraisers — they are even selling coffee — trying to raise $250,000 to subsidize pool operations.

Talking to them, you get a sense their promise of help is good to the last drop of water in a city pool. They are not ready to throw in the towel.

“Pools are low-cost playgrounds for families and provide safe and healthy family-fun alternatives,” Rhodes said. “Water is life. It is so important to so many people.

“But we need help.”

Help is what the Friends have done for Springs swimmers since the group incorporated in 1998 when a city budget crunch led to soaring fees that threatened to lock out poor kids out of city pools.

In the years since, Friends has helped tens of thousands swimmers in the Springs.

In 2009, it paid for 6,500 children to attend Learn to Swim classes. It helped pay for programs for arthritis suffers, Junior Life Guard training and others.

In 2004, it paid $1,500 for YMCA memberships to ensure kids in Deerfield Hills, perhaps the city’s poorest neighborhood, would be able to swim that summer after the pool at its community center closed. Eventually the pool was replaced by a sprayground that will remain dry if the center closes, as planned.

The Friends’ immediate goal is to keep the two indoor facilities — Memorial Park and Cottonwood Creek — operating and to open Wilson Ranch pool for the summer. But the two indoor pools alone cost the city about $1.5 million a year, said Paul Butcher, city parks director. Fees cover less than half the expense.

Barry has analyzed operations and believes she can cut costs to require “just” $250,000 in subsidy.

This might seem insurmountable. Barry and Rhodes think they could do it, if they had more time. But the council only gave them until March 31 — the same deadline facing community centers, too.

“It wasn’t enough time,” said Barry, who retired in December, rather than face layoff, after running the city’s aquatics programs for decades. “We intend to go to council to ask for more time. We will show them our program and hope they agree to give us more time.”

Barry wants to stop a private school from taking over three pools and running them to make a profit. She said it’s important the pools remain public and reasonably priced.

To learn how to get involved, go to my blog at
 gazette.com/blogs/sidestreets