Will Santa Clara finally rebuild the aging International Swim Center?

SANTA CLARA — It’s been nearly three months since anyone has swam at the storied George F. Haines International Swim Center — renown pools where world-class Olympic teams once trained daily.

As it turns out, a broken heater at the city-owned aquatics facility could keep swimmers sidelined until the end of August or September, said Santa Clara Parks and Recreation Director James Teixeira.

Now, there’s a renewed push by groups using the pools and elected officials for the city to rebuild the nearly 60-year-old swim center.

Set in a single-family neighborhood off the bustling San Tomas Expressway, the International Swim Center, which was renamed in 2000 to bear the famed U.S. Olympic coach’s name, has been the training grounds for elite swimmers with the Santa Clara Swim Club, like Don Schollander, Donna de Varona and Mark Spitz.

The facility’s Olympic lore stretches to the 17-foot-deep diving well where the legendary Santa Clara Aquamaids train. Head coach Chris Carver trained the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympic synchronized swimming teams in Santa Clara and is set to be inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame this year.

Divers, water polo players, masters swimmers and a learn-to-swim program also use the facility on a nearly daily basis, which is made up of a 50-meter lap swimming pool, a diving well and a shallow water pool. The swim center is also open to the public for lap swimming year-round and recreational swimming in the summer.

But all of those programs have come to a halt due to the broken heater, and extended closures have become more frequent over the years as the aging pool, which was built in 1965, continues to have maintenance problems. Because of the age of the pool, many of the parts need to be custom-made, turning what once could have been a simple fix into a painstakingly long closure.

Santa Clara has tried several times since the late 1990s to secure the funding needed for a complete rebuild.

“Each time the city has gotten close in terms of community input usually there’s something in the environment that happens like Y2K or the 2008-2009 recession or the pandemic,” Teixeira said.

At a recent Santa Clara City Council meeting, Finance Director Kenn Lee said the city has varying estimates from $30 million to more than $100 million to design and construct a new swim center either at its current place or adjacent to the current facility in Central Park.

Mayor Lisa Gillmor told the Mercury News that the city is at a “critical point” with the swim center and hopes to see a bond measure on the ballot in November 2024.

The city had previously targeted the November 2020 election for a general obligation bond, but when the pandemic hit, priorities shifted. Any talk of trying again in 2022 was quickly nixed because of the city’s poor financial state.

If it wasn’t for the pandemic, though, the mayor believes the city would be constructing a new swim center right now.

Previous design iterations for a new facility have been costly, with one estimate in 2016 at $184 million. Those plans included a 171,650 square-foot combined swim and recreation center that would have had a pool for swimming lessons, a 50-meter training pool, a 50-meter competition pool and a diving well with arena seating.

Gillmor said that she’s hoping the city can downsize the project to an affordable number in the $80 million to $100 million range.

“That would be something I think we can do to build a facility that is something that we’re proud of and something that can continue the legacy that is built in the last 50 years in Santa Clara,” she said. “It’s not going to be cheap for us, but I think it’s something that we owe our community.”

The mayor said that any bond measure will likely include other items like renovations or upgrades to parks, libraries, seniors centers or community centers.

Councilmember Kevin Park said he believes the city needs to find a way to maintain its facilities across the board without having to go to the public with a bond measure — especially since Santa Clara currently has roughly $500 million of aged infrastructure.

With a new aquatics facility, he said the city needs to “build the maintenance into the lifetime of the swim center, of the pool, of the structure so that if it’s generating money, we put money into a fund that is explicitly there for the maintenance, upkeep and demolition.”

For Santa Clara Swim Club head coach Kevin Zacher, the pool’s closure has been challenging and costly. Other pools in the city also are quickly aging or are too small to support all of the club’s swimmers, forcing them to spread out at pools across the area.

“We’re losing membership because folks just can’t make the schedule work,” he said, noting that most of the kids are swimming at Independence High School in San Jose, which in traffic, can be an hour’s drive for many parents. “It is costing us a lot more. It’s been a lot more money to rent outside facilities that we didn’t budget for so the club is hurting financially and our numbers are down so that also hurts us financially.”

Zacher said he hopes the community can “rally around” the need for a new aquatics facility — not just for competitive swimmers, but for the many individuals who use the pool for lifelong exercise and young children who are still learning how to swim and about the importance of water safety.