Baltimore City Recreation and Parks held a community open house Wednesday evening at its headquarters at Druid Lake Park to discuss changes to its pool facilities and summer programming.
About 50 Baltimoreans in attendance asked questions and aired grievances with some of the agency’s logistical and programming switches, especially its hiring of lifeguards and the decision to open several city pools only six days a week, rather than seven.
The pools at Druid Hill, Lake Clifton and Riverside, will be closed every Monday, while the Patterson, Roosevelt and Middle Branch pools will be closed every Tuesday this summer for “weekly maintenance days.”
“In order to protect the city’s investment, we had to take a step back and see what benefits our pools the best,” BCRP Deputy Director of Recreation Karen Jordan told the attendees.
She said that after careful consideration, officials chose the maintenance days for each pool based on the days of the week those pools were least busy.
One attendee asked Johnson if the pools closing one day each week means that they aren’t being maintained every other day of the week.
She explained that while the pool staff at each of the city’s pools clean and complete superficial maintenance on a daily basis, the dedicated cleaning days are to ensure that the more technical aspects of their operations are handled regularly. This is to stave off more long-term pool closures, like the closing of Patterson Park Pool in 2023, due to flood damage and repairs.
Another community member raised her concerns about the number of lifeguards at each of the city’s public pools — a concern that was also mentioned in a recent audit of BCRP, determining that the agency may not be meeting staffing regulation requirements.
The audit cites Baltimore regulation that requires at least one lifeguard on duty at a pool for the first 1 to 30 people, then, one more lifeguard for every additional 50 swimmers.
According to BCRP Chief of Aquatics Nikki Cobbs, the agency is finalizing its lifeguard hiring process and currently has an applicant pool of approximately 150, which should be enough to handle the estimated average of 3,371 people who visit Baltimore city pools each day.
Baltimore city pools will be open on weekends beginning Saturday, and weekdays beginning after the last day of school on June 17, according to the BCRP. The agency plans to hold another community open house at the end of the season.
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