Dear Jessica (via bcc), Thank you for your thoughtful message to the City Council about Burgess Pool operations, and for your patience and understanding awaiting a reply during a busy and hectic week. As the director of recreation programs for the City of Menlo Park, I welcome and encourage questions, concerns, and suggestions about the services we provide to the community. In regard to your concerns about the Burgess Pool operations, you raise some understandable points which merit thoughtful response and clarification. As you correctly pointed out, the day-to-day pool operations are managed by a third-party operator, Menlo Swim & Sport, under contract with the City. This arrangement, which has been in place for many years, allows the City to deliver a wide variety of high-quality aquatics programs, staffed by seasoned professionals, to the community at a reasonable cost to taxpayers and pool users. The City exercises close oversight of the pool operations through this contractual arrangement, including most recently by imposing strict but necessary health and safety restrictions designed to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Those restrictions have reduced the allowable volume of pool visitors by approximately 75%. This has necessitated significant reconfigurations of the pool operations in order for the operator to remain financially viable while protecting public health during this challenging and unprecedented pandemic. Your message also referenced several of your ongoing operational concerns from even before the pandemic began. In order to provide you the detailed information you requested and which you deserve to have at your disposal as a resident of Menlo Park, I asked the founder of Menlo Swim & Sport, Tim Sheeper, to provide detailed responses to the operational concerns you articulated. His responses are attached to this email. I hope this information is helpful. Please feel free to contact me directly should you have additional questions or need more information. My contact information is in my email signature below. I look forward to hearing from you again, if I can be of further assistance. Thank you again for taking the time to articulate your concerns, and for being a Burgess Pool user. Best regards, Sean [cid:CMP_Email_Logo_100dpi_05d92d5b-e8e3-498f-93a6-d0da509bd602111111111.png] Sean S. Reinhart Library and Community Services Director Main Library 800 Alma St. tel 650-330-2510 menlopark.org http://www.menlopark.org/ > From: Jessica Taylor [mailto: _at_(domainremoved) Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2020 1:26 PM To: _CCIN Subject: Menlo Park Pools Are Not Serving The Community Hi there, For a number of years, I've been increasingly alarmed as I've watched the Burgess Pool become privatized by the contractor the city has in place. Where there were once group swim lessons, now much of the pool is reserved for private lessons. In the morning, when I like to frequent the pool for laps before work, the Master's Program takes up all but two of the lanes that community members may use. This means that often eight or ten people have to share two lanes, even when the lanes reserved for Masters students have fewer people in them. And on weekends, free swim for families has been relegated to a few lanes for a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Many weekends, the lap pool is also closed due to private events like water polo tournaments and triathlon events. These are teams that pay to use our community's resources even as the local community is getting squeezed out. Now with the re-opening of the pool in these pandemic conditions, this privatization of our city pool has only become more stark. Lap swimming lanes are not open to community members between 6-8 am and reserved for Masters swimmers only. This program is $120/mo and cost-prohibitive for many families in our community including mine. The pool has also begun offering private swim lessons again to families for a staggering $76 per lesson. I have brought my concerns over the years to Tim Sheeper and his team, but they have fallen on deaf ears. I've been told they can't make changes, that I don't understand the aquatics industry today, etc...While I understand that our pool is an invaluable resource and rising costs in our area pose challenges, I also understand that I'm a tax paying member of our community. In my opinion, these resources are being misused and abused to benefit the contractor's bottom line and an elite subset of our community. I'm concerned that there's little to no oversight of this contract to ensure that the private company running our community pool is actually serving our community in an equitable way. I'd like to ask the City Council to investigate the situation and/or take action to ensure that standards are met so that the entire community has access to our pools both from a pricing and availability standpoint. Thank you! Jessica Taylor 1415 Mills Ct. (image/png attachment: CMP_Email_Logo_100dpi_05d92d5b-e8e3-498f-93a6-d0da509bd602111111111.png ) application/pdf attachment: Burgess-Pool.pdf
