By Dave Anderson:
A few days ago, I took my 20 month old daughter to a sprayground as the temperature hit 90 degrees. Spraygrounds are great for toddlers; she splashed around, sat on water jets until she moved in surprise when she got wet, and stomped on drains. She had a blast for ninety minutes, and I was able to relax and talk to a few other parents while we all kept a loose, collective eye on our kids.
The city of Pittsburgh recently built the sprayground on the site of an abandoned city pool. The city has not build a new pool in over a decade, but has built several spraygrounds in the past two years, with several more on schedule to be built. The city loves the sprayground concept because the capital cost is lower, the physical depreciation is lower, the operating costs are lower and the personnel costs are much lower (60 hours a week of a guy with a first aid kit and a broom versus 200+ hours of lifeguards per week). The sprayground concept is building out in the city of Pittsburgh and many other cities.
The city I grew up in had a population of 98,000 people. We had seven
public full-service swimming centers and two wading pools. I learned to
swim in those pools and river and I taught dozens of kids how to swim
when I worked as a lifeguard for the city. The city of Pittsburgh has a
population of 310,000 and has eighteen public swimming facilities. The pool to
population ratio in the city of Pittsburgh is worse than it was in
Lowell. And that is after several years of the city of Pittsburgh
slowly re-expanding the number of pools that are open after budget cuts
in 2005 closed most pools.
Spraygrounds are great for toddlers. Kids my daughter's age can't swim and really should not be learning how to swim yet. However, once a child enters kindergarten, they are in prime learn to swim and swimming periods of their lives. neighborhood spraygrounds are useless at teaching kids how to swim. Cutting pools and then paving over them for a sprayground is better than paving them over for an empty piece of asphalt. However, it is yet one more public amenity that is closing down as fewer kids will learn how to swim and have a safe place to swim (not in the rivers).
Middle class folks can work around this amenity cutback by embracing the privatization of previously public services. Pool memberships are affordable (enough) in Pittsburgh at $300 or more for a family for the summer. However the amenity cutbacks are not just the number of pools being cut and being replaced with minimally useful spraygrounds; it is everything from summer reading programs (most needed for kids in weak public schools) to meals on wheels to the number of cops on a beat. This is the future we'll ratify in November.
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