A pressure campaign is underway to save the University of Victoria’s only swimming pool.
Users of UVic’s McKinnon Pool were caught off guard last month when the university suddenly announced the 50-year-old facility would be shuttered permanently in September.
The school says the aging pool had “reached the end of its natural lifecycle and is now too costly to maintain.”
The news is not sitting well with students, staff or alumni — including Wayne Kelly, a former Olympian and UVic swimming alumnus who still uses the pool today.
Kelly started a Facebook group and a petition that’s attracted more than 4,000 signatures in a bid to save the facility.
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“We’re not talking about closing a room, we’re talking about closing a major aquatic facility, and to have two and a bit months’ notice was a real surprise and a shock to all of us,” he said.
“I’m hearing from all the various communities, whether it’s a parent whose son or daughter swims for the team here, community members who use the pool, UVic students … synchronized swimming, underwater hockey players, they’re all really upset.”
Kelly said the school’s rationale for shuttering the pool was based on a list of issues compiled by staff, rather than an engineering report.
That review came up with a $1.5 million price tag for repairs, he said.
Along with students and varsity athletes, the pool is used by the broader Victoria community, including groups like the Pacific Coast Swimming Club.
“It does need repairs and there’s been lots of things going wrong in there for a while, there has been tiles breaking, there’s been some problems with the ventilation and they haven’t been fixing it and I guess this is why, they’ve been planning on closing it all along,” swim coach Grace Macdonald said.
There are just seven other public pools in Greater Victoria, and Macdonald said losing the UVic facility would force swim clubs to compete for time in those already crowded facilities.
“We’re running out of space to teach kids aquatics,” she said.
No one at the university was available for comment, but Global News was told it is working on a community update about the aquatic centre in the coming week.
Kelly said he met with the university’s president this week, and he’s hopeful some kind of solution can be worked out.
“We talked for 35 minutes yesterday – and he is committed to delaying the closure of the pool on the 15th, they will still – in his words “drain the pool”, and do a proper engineering assessment,” he said.
Kelly said he’s already had significant community interest in fundraising to save the pool, at least in the short term until a new aquatic facility can be built in a future expansion of the university’s CARSA building.
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