While many Kiwis are now drowning in debt, some are literally drowning. Official figures show nearly one hundred preventable deaths per year. Learning to swim saves lives. Which is why many schools had pools. But ‘health and safety’ gone mad has seen a lot of them close their pools in recent years. The logic of this defeats me.
The Municipal Pools in Hamilton was a centre of learning for one hundred years from 1912 to 2012 before it was closed.
The BFD. Hamilton Municipal Pools, Victoria St.
The council runs two other pools and is planning a fourth, so “health and safety” was not a factor in the decision. The poor state of repair of the pools was the “reason” used, and it was valid. They were in a bad state, but that was caused by council slashing maintenance twenty years earlier. The term for this is “demolition by neglect”, a way of circumventing public consultation.
The Audit Office agreed, and criticised the council in 2013 because the deliberate running down of the public facility was not consistent with their responsibilities under the Local Government Act.
A group of concerned residents formed an association called Sink or Swim, to try and save the pools. A major driver was that the pools were used by 21 schools.
Sink or Swim prepared renovation and redevelopment plans, as well as a strong business case supported by extensive research on users, and even lined up sponsors. If the council didn’t want to manage the facility, the Amateur Swimming Club could do it as it had for the previous thirty years. It should have been an easy decision for council to reopen the pools.
But the council is currently applying to itself for consent to demolish the pools. This sets a bad precedent. Councils in the United States are using a legal term known as “blight” to seize private property. They pass bylaws to make certain activities uneconomic, then declare buildings to be blighted (run-down) and confiscate the land.
It has long been surmised that the council wants the land under the pools, but this is denied. Instead, in a rare display of fiscal prudence, the council has repeatedly claimed that redevelopment work would be too expensive.
Now the government’s “shovel-ready” put paid to that argument. Huge subsidies were made available, supporting 6 major council swimming pool renovations across the country. Hawke’s Bay Aquatic Centre got $32 million out of a $33 million budget, the redevelopment of the Gisborne Olympic Pool got $40 million out of a $46 million budget, and the Westland District Council got 100% of the $3 million it asked for to fix the Hokitika Swimming Pool.
Unfortunately, Hamilton City Council never applied to fund the Municipal Pools, despite putting forward $2 billion in other requests. It is clear that the council simply didn’t want the money. The decision on the pools was made long ago, and no amount of public consultation or mere Acts of Parliament will change that.
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