Carmichael Park Pool, circa 1950s. Photo courtesy of the Carmichael Chamber of Commerce.

CARMICHAEL, CA (MPG) – In Carmichael Park, there’s a grassy field where a community swimming pool once stood. It was a place where kids learned to swim, adults exercised and everyone had fun. After nearly half a century, when it came time to replace the deteriorating facility, the money never materialized. It’s been over two decades since the pool closed. Do people want it back? That’s what the Carmichael Recreation and Park District is trying to find out.

“Everybody else around us has a pool,” said Ken Hall, a board member of the Carmichael Parks Foundation. “You can go to Citrus Heights. You can go to Rancho Cordova. You can go to Elk Grove. You can go to Sacramento. All of them have got pools. Why not Carmichael?”

An anonymous donor approached the district and gave $40,000 to fund the Pool Feasibility Study. The aquatic design firm Counsilman-Hunsaker was hired to research potential costs, with help from the Cumming Group, a local building consultant. An online survey was created to gauge public interest in a new public pool in Carmichael, what features to include and where to build it. The three possible locations floated were Carmichael Park, Del Campo Park and the La Sierra Community Center. An online community discussion was held on Feb. 24, and the survey closed on March 9. The study’s findings will be made public when it’s presented to the advisory board later this year. 

“There's been a buzz over the years about a pool here in Carmichael, since the pool closed down,” said Stacey Yankee, the park district administrator.

Several schools and parks have swimming pools, but there is nothing open to the general public in Carmichael. Every year, people drown on the Sacramento and American rivers. Another safe venue offering swimming lessons could help save lives.

“The park district would like to assist the community in having swim lessons, but without a pool, there are challenges with that,” Yankee said.

The original Carmichael Park Pool resulted from a grassroots campaign that aggressively fundraised, according to scanned copies of local publications found on Newspapers.com. In 1953, members of the Business and Professional Women’s Club collected 400 signatures in support of building a pool and presented them to the park district advisory board. A committee was soon organized to research and develop the project. Construction of the pool and bathhouse cost under $50,000, which, adjusted for inflation, would be a little over $600,000 today. 

The park district and county covered roughly a third, and over 20 community organizations set out to fundraise the rest. Volunteers went door-to-door asking for donations and organized fundraisers, including a dance, a pancake breakfast, a basketball game, a beauty pageant, a comedic play, an art auction and a May Day festival. The Carmichael Westerner called the successful campaign “almost a miracle.” The Carmichael Park Pool held its dedication ceremony in 1956.

Over the decades, government health and safety codes changed. The high dive board and kiddie pool were removed when they no longer met modern standards, Yankee said. The pool began to leak as it reached the end of its life cycle. It was too expensive to repair and bring into code compliance. So, the park district closed it in 2004 and got to work on a replacement. A state-of-the-art aquatic center came with a $10 million price tag. One idea was to sell off unused parkland to house developers, but that was never implemented.  

The Friends of Carmichael Aquatic Center was formed in 2008 to study local interest in the project and seek out donors. The group reorganized a year later as the Carmichael Parks Foundation. Hall has been a board member since the early days. He cited two issues that led to the new pool’s failure: marketing and timing. First, the project was called an “aquatic center” instead of a community pool, which Hall said confused people. Second, research was done during the Great Recession when the housing market collapsed. Surveys showed that not enough people were willing to support a tax or bond measure for it to pass.

“It wasn’t a good time for a poll,” Hall said. “I mean, if you're trying to measure interest in people spending money and people are losing the value on their homes around them, it's not a great time to ask our questions as we did so.”

While fundraising worked in the ‘50s, it would cost millions to build a pool that met modern health and safety codes. It would have been impossible for small donations to cover the costs, and the foundation was unable to find enough larger donors to foot the bill. So, the pool sat abandoned for almost a decade. In 2013, the park district and county spent $65,000 to demolish the building. Today, the empty field is used for soccer and disc golf. 

The only way to fund a new public pool in Carmichael is for residents to approve a new tax or bond measure. In 2022, voters passed Measure G, a $31.9 million general obligation bond program to fund park maintenance and improvements. Yankee said its passing shows Carmichael residents are willing to invest in public facilities. But she won’t know for certain if there is demand for a pool until the feasibility study is completed and published.

“The community has shown that they're willing to support parks, at least doing some deferred maintenance and upkeep,” Yankee said. “New construction, new projects, along with ongoing maintenance costs, that is another level, but we want to hear from the community, and we're hopeful.”