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As Mountain View wraps up construction at the Rengstorff Park Aquatics Center, the city has set its sights on another pool renovation, this time at Eagle Park where deferred maintenance at the aging facility has crossed over into major repair work.
In a unanimous vote, the Parks and Recreation Commission recommended on Wednesday, May 8 that the City Council commit $1.8 million to fund infrastructure improvements for Eagle Park Pool.
“I remember when it opened, it was a gem. And it still is conceptually a gem, but it’s just in disrepair,” Commissioner Steve Filios said at the meeting.
The proposed renovations for the Eagle Park Pool are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of replacing the Rengstorff Park Aquatics Center. The city allocated $29 million towards the project and began construction about two years ago, bulldozing the original structure to build an 8,200-square-foot facility with new swimming pools, showers, lockers, staff offices and a multipurpose recreational area.
As part of the city’s commitment to green building standards, the aquatics center is also entirely electrified, using photovoltaic and solar thermal energy systems to heat the pools. The city is still testing out the heating systems and needs to go through more inspection processes, but is anticipating that the pool will reopen sometime this summer, according to David Printy, principal project manager.
“There’s a fair amount of startup and testing of those systems to make sure that they don’t just work on day one, but for the foreseeable future,” Printy said.
The proposed renovations for Eagle Park Pool are far more modest in scope, but still substantial. The facility has sunk into a major state of disrepair, to the extent that city staff have recommended an accelerated timeline to allocate funding to the pool so that it can be repaired sooner.
“This is no longer minor maintenance at this point. This is a significant renovation,” said Community Services Director John Marchant, who presented the report to the commission.
The top renovations include a new deck and pool replastering, which has not occurred since 2001. Typically, pool replastering should happen every 10 to 15 years. The underwater pool lighting and movable bulkhead, used to adjust the pool size, also need to be replaced, as neither are fully operational. The report also recommended removing a diving board that has a structural crack and has been out of use since 2021.
The commissioners agreed that the improvements were necessary, while raising some concerns about why maintenance work was not done sooner to potentially avoid some of these more costly infrastructural interventions.
“In our strategic plan, I hope we have a lot of emphasis on maintenance because building wonderful facilities and building wonderful parks is great, but unless we maintain them, they stop being wonderful after a certain time,” Commissioner Ronit Bryant said.
Addressing these concerns, city staff said they are taking an inventory of all of the city’s assets, which then would be put into a work order software system that could automate maintenance notifications. Currently, the city does not have this kind of system in place, staff said.
The City Council will review the capital improvement program in June with the recommendation to allocate $1.8 million to Eagle Park Pool. If the council approves the funding, renovations could possibly start in the fall of 2025 and would take about four to six months to complete, according to Assistant Community Services Director Kristine Crosby.
Until then, the Eagle Park pool will remain open to the public and once construction at the Rengstorff pool is complete, it will operate all-year round too, Crosby said.
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This is an excellent value for your money. Would be great if they tweaked the bathrooms too. But otherwise, a very penny wise renovation.
Facilities Department dropped the ball on the maintenance. I’m sure work orders were put in with them throughout the years.