Heat is one of the leading weather-related killers in the U.S., according to the National Weather Service. Public pools have been a time-tested solution for keeping cool.
“They’re an important fabric of the community,” Covington Communication Manager Dan Hassert said of public pools. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve remained so committed to them despite the high costs and challenges. Not only are they an important part of the activities in park and rec that our families enjoy, but they’re just part of the social fabric.”
As summer temperatures have risen to record levels in recent years, though, more and more pools are closing.
In the most controversial case, Cincinnati’s Sunlite Pool was sold, along with the rest of Coney Island, to Music and Event Management Inc., the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra subsidiary that manages venues including Riverbend and the Brady Music Center. MEMI plans to build a $118 million performance venue on the former amusement park.
Coney Island opened in 1886 and added Sunlite Pool in 1925. It was the largest recirculating pool in the country and immediately became a top destination for decades of Greater Cincinnatians seeking sanctuary from scorching summer temperatures.
In the 1930s, northern Kenton County was home to a popular natural swimming hole that was later named Pleasure Isle. According to a 2017 story by LINK nky partner WCPO, Pleasure Isle, at the intersection of the 3L Highway and Hands Pike, was formed by runoff from Banklick Creek.
According to WCPO, it was referred to as a swim club. It featured tennis courts, horseshoe pits, badminton, shuffleboard and a mini-golf course. A sand-bottom pit served as a pool until a concrete one was constructed in 1951. Anyone who paid the daily admission fee could swim; in the evenings, the club had live music and entertainment.
In 1976, the site caught fire, destroying the pool clubhouse, bar and onsite barber shop. The swim club continued until 1997, though, when it was forced to close due to the widening of the 3L Highway.
Today, Covington’s Goebel Park Pool faces the same fate. It’s in the path of the Brent Spence Corridor and would have had to close in 2025 for construction. With that deadline already in sight, the Covington Commission on April 9 voted against repairing Goebel Park Pool for the 2024 season. Commissioners decided the estimated $500,000 worth of needed work wasn’t worth the short investment.
Although Covington is losing one of its public swimming options, an agreement with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet means the city stands to be reimbursed for the loss of the pool and land. The cabinet agreed to give the city $1.3 million to fund a replacement pool and $100,000 to update the city’s master parks plan.
“When we do it, where we do it and how we do it is not yet known,” Hassert said. “We are going to go to the public; we’re going to do a formal community engagement process to see exactly what they want.”
This is not the first time Covington has had to replace a pool that closed. The Latonia Splash Pad was built after the closing of Covington’s Rosedale Pool. The pool was forced to close in the late 1990s after a flood destroyed it.
The Latonia Splash Pad is in the Bill Cappel Youth Sports Complex, 4305 Decoursey Ave. It offers hoses, sprinklers, slides and play equipment.
“The [Licking] river was so dang high it cracked the pool in half,” Hassert said. “This was long before our time, but the commissioners at the time, for whatever reason, decided that it was too expensive to replace. But in return we got the splash pad, which, you know, caters to a whole different element.”
Years before Hassert worked for Covington in his current role, his first job was working for the city’s parks and recreation department at the pools. He served as a lifeguard at Rosedale Pool.
“The contribution of a city pool to the community – I mean, working at the pool, at least in my day – was sort of a rite of passage if you’re a teenager in Covington,” Hassert said. “You start out in the basket room, then the concession stand, and then you get to be a lifeguard and whatnot. Hundreds if not thousands of Covington teenagers did that progression.”
He said he saw that rite of passage culture through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Hassert said he doesn’t expect the city to start building a replacement for Goebel Pool immediately, but he doesn’t expect it will have to wait for the completion of the bridge corridor, either.
Despite the closing of Goebel Pool, Covington remains the only city in Northern Kentucky with a public pool and splash pad option for its residents. It will still operate Randolph Park’s pool at East Eighth and Greenup streets in the Eastside.
Annual pool passes are free to Covington residents. “The commission made that commitment years ago and works that into their budget priority every year because we think it’s important that the residents can swim,” Hassert said.
“Not everybody is rich, you know, and can get a pass to a private pool.”
There were 1,600 new memberships in 2023 and 7,689 active memberships for the pool season.
“That’s the No. 1 call we get every day during the summer; there’s probably 20 calls a day,” said Greg Stacy, Covington Parks project coordinator . “When can I get in the pool? When does the pool open?”
Six different beaches were popular in Dayton and Bellevue in 1891, including the Manhattan Bathing Beaches and Tacoma Beach. According to Dayton’s website, the construction of a series of dams on the river by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to raise the river levels caused commercial traffic and water pollution, which cut into the popularity of the beaches.
As a result of the decline, Dayton’s website said the owner of Tacoma Beach, one of the beaches located in the city, constructed a 130 foot-by-150 foot in-ground swimming pool filled by an artesian well that runs under Dayton as part of a larger amusement park. Like Rosedale Pool, a flood – in this case, the 1937 Ohio River flood – destroyed Tacoma Park. It could not recover.
Today, it’s the site of Manhattan Harbour Yacht Club and Marina.
With public pools around Greater Cincinnati closing, splash pads have become popular and have even replaced former pools, as Covington saw with Rosedale. Still, only two public splash pads currently operate in Northern Kentucky, and some cities have struck down the idea due to cost.
Wilder operates a splash pad that is free to everyone, not just its residents. The city’s park, located behind the city building on Licking Pike, added the splash pad to the existing playground in June 2021.
Wilder City Manager Terry Vance said that, when they were building the fire station and remodeling the park, they were trying to find an option that wasn’t so common at the time. Initially, they considered a water feature but not an entire splash pad.
“We looked at designers, catalogs and other things, and we realized that the price wasn’t really that exorbitant compared to what we were spending on the firehouse and the park renovation,” Vance said. “We just decided it would be a nice feature to have here.”
There is a lot of infrastructure tied to the splash pad, Vance said. There are pumps, a pit where water goes in and a chlorination system. As for maintenance, he said the main task is testing the water, which they do about five times daily.
“It’s like a pool; the pool water stays in the pool,” Vance said. “It goes to a pump room, it gets chlorinated, tested, treated, and it stays in the system. Occasionally, because of evaporation and kids that run away with a lot of water on them, kids take water in water bottles. We have to add water to it every once in a while, and we just fill the tank with water that we get from the water district.”
He said the city’s highest costs for maintaining the splash pad are chlorine and staff time. The public works department is responsible for maintaining the splash pad in addition to performing other duties. Vance said that is why the city needed a splash pad season, which runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Vance said a city might not want a splash pad because of liability, space and cost. “It’s a pretty big expense,” Vance said.
“You can build a dry playground for the cost of a wet playground. The problem is, what do they want more? [A wet playground] is seasonal. A lot of times, you can use the playground, and you can’t use the splash pad because they’re closed. In the summertime, we shut it down because of lightning and thunderstorms.”
In the beginning, the city also experienced headaches due to people littering and bringing things into the splash pad that were not permitted.
“We thought that, first, you know, 10 rules and we had a rule sign out there,” Vance said. “We’ve got to the point now where we’ve got a scrolling set of rules above the concession stand because every time somebody does something different that we didn’t think about, it’s like, oh, that should probably be a rule too.”
Why does Wilder keep the splash pad free? Vance said one of the difficulties were the city to charge admission to the splash pad is deciding who would get in free. He said residents and people who work in the city pay city taxes, whether property or payroll. Further, the city would have to pay for a fence around the splash pad and hire an attendant to check passes.
“I think the thing that people don’t realize is that the people who come here go to United Dairy Farmers or Ameristop,” Vance said. “They fill up their gas tanks here, they get snacks, they look at Wilder and say, ‘You know, maybe I want to live in a city that does this kind of thing.’ I don’t think it hurts anybody to let people come for free.”
Vance said he thinks a city might consider a splash pad over a pool because of the liability and that a pool requires hiring lifeguards.
Stacey said Covington’s contract with Swimsafe Pool Management Inc., is $166,000 yearly to maintain the facilities.
“During the summer, they take care of all the chemicals and staffing,” Stacey said. “The only additional costs are through our public works team. They handle the, I guess you’d say, ‘jumpstart’ of the pools at the beginning of the year.”
Periodically, he said the city also incurs improvement costs, such as for a new roof that was recently put on the splash pad. The city used an American Rescue Plan Act grant for that project, which cost $78,000.
Both splash pads and pools also require liability insurance, another cost to cities.
Pools cost more than splash pads to build. Conversations with contractors who specialize in pool construction suggest the $1.3 million Covington stands to receive from the transportation cabinet would likely not be enough to replace Goebel Park Pool.
An Olympic-sized swimming pool with a depth of 2 meters, or about 7 feet, holds about 660,000 gallons of water, according to World Aquatics, the international sports regulatory federation recognized by the International Olympic Committee. This is larger than Goebel Park’s roughly 450,000 gallons, but it serves as good gauge for comparing costs.
A representative from Brandstetter Carroll, a design and engineering firm that designed Ziegler Park Pool in Cincinnati as well as the Florence Aquatic Center, put the cost for the design and construction of a public pool with roughly Olympic-sized dimensions at between $3 million and $20 million, depending on its amenities. He said one would be “hard pressed” not to find a project for a full-sized pool that didn’t cost at least $4.5 million. Brandstetter Carroll is currently designing a pool in Lexington with a price tag of $5.5 million.
Fort Thomas considered implementing a splash pad like Wilder’s while looking to redo Tower Park. In September 2023 the city council approved spending $3.6 million on a playground upgrade and other improvements in the park. Council member Adam Blau spoke in favor of adding the splash pad at the meeting, saying it was a top priority in the comprehensive plan and that he had heard from many residents who wanted it.
The feature would have cost an additional $315,000, however, and so the city opted not to include it in its final plans.
Vance said he believes the splash pad has become a good thing for his city.
“There are a lot of grandparents who bring their grandkids here. There are a lot of parents who bring their kids here,” he said. “So, it’s really been a good thing for the city overall. I think we had some growing pains the first couple of years. But we’ve gotten better at how to maintain it and how to do things.”
Other public Northern Kentucky pools
• Vets Pool, 26 Caroline Ave., Newport. This 25-meter swimming pool with a diving well is in Veterans Memorial Park. The park also offers two ballfields with players’ benches and bleachers, showers, lockers, restroom facilities, a concession stand and vending machines, and a shelter with picnic tables.
• Florence Family Aquatic Center, 8200 Ewing Blvd., Florence. The center features a lazy river, competition pool, zero-depth pool, two spray grounds, spiral and speed slides, sunbathing areas, shelters, umbrellas, a bathhouse and concessions area.
