Desegregation occurring when the push to dismantle government run services was gaining traction caused the loss of public pools. Americans acquired an irrational fear of government in the 70s and 80s. We lost public pools, publicly run ambulance service, publicly run garbage collection. Police departments no longer service their own vehicles.
I think it's important to remember how linked these are. In many places the response to desegregation was to dismantle as much public infrastructure as possible and replace it with private infrastructure that was legally integrated but functionalaly segregated.
What is the benefit of outsourcing that to a private company that pays its workers much less in salary and a benefits? The money spent on maintenance is roughy the same but now the jobs for the workers are less desirable less well paid. The money now goes to the business owner. All the business owner is doing to squeezing money out of the workers to enrich themselves. There is no benefit to society in doing this. Indeed it is a loss for the community.
Are you under the impression that government contracts for vehicle maintenance are immune to becoming sinecures for the politically connected? Only mechanics are subject to this possibility?
Obviously some outsourcing is good and some bad. You seem not to understand that this could be true. Only a fool thinks all instances of outsourcing are good (or bad).
Typically people don’t live in a world of extreme positions whereby one occurrence of outsourcing being good (or bad) means all of them are. It is obvious the position that I have. Government has outsourced too many jobs to the private sector and the effect has been to enrich the business class at the expense of the working class.
I question whether these positions would be better paying if they were filled by government employees. In every case I can think of, government employees earn less than their private sector counterparts.
Can you name a few people positions as an example? Particularly in lifetime earnings and total comp government work in teaching, chemistry, and administrative work is 1.5x or more that of theprivate sector median with much stronger protections. In particular pensiins, health care, and early retirement make up for a lot in terms of starting hourly wage.
I think you may be right as it stands now but I don’t think this was right in 1980. When factoring in benefits, pension, working conditions, and employment stability I think even today it may not be clear who is better off.
> Why should police departments do automobile maintenance?
Because, as we have seen, outsourcing these kinds of services is rarely cheaper and never actually better.
By keeping it in house, you can hire people correctly for the volume of maintenance you do. Your people become very good at the specific needs and faults of your system (see: Why SF firefighters make and repair their own ladders). And when you genuinely need something, you can redeploy your labor.
All outsourcing does is create an extra middleman whose mouth you must feed and whose workers you have no control over.
Executives, of course, loved outsourcing as it let them crack up the unions.
Government agencies that serviced their own vehicles just ended up with a fleet of non-working vehicles. At least that was true for those for which the vehicle fleet was of secondary concern.
And for something like a police department, the efficiencies disappear with modern vehicles which need less maintenance.
Yes it was irrational of Americans to fear government run ambulance services and whatnot. All governments are capable of doing bad things. The reaction to this fact ought not be the dismantling of those government services that worked and provided tangible benefits to the people. Certain politicians decried government inefficiency and said that government can’t work. Once elected they did everything they could to prove themselves correct.
Public pools are also disappearing in my country (Austria).
It's mostly a cost issue. Towns see the huge maintenance bill and decide to close their pool. Half the indoor pools I went to in my childhood are now closed. No new public pools have been built.
When I was a kid, I had swimming classes every other week in school. My kids have swimming classes 4 times a year because the few remaining pools that schools can go to are overbooked.
The completely predictable result is that the number of kids and adults who can't swim is growing every year.
Unrelated but thought to follow up. When I grew up, in the 70s - 80s, I have fond memories of going to the public indoor swimming pool where I lived in a suburb to Stockholm. The smell of chlorinated water, the sounds of kids playing echoing on the tiled walls, sweating the sauna afterwards. Above all, a strict hygiene regime. No underwear in shower, sauna or pool. Just swim pants in the pool, naked in the sauna.
Somehow, this has changed. Kids don't give a shit and swim with their underwear underneath their swimpants. I don't know what the staff are doing but seems they have lost control. I am disgusted and will not visit public pools anymore. I wonder if this is a more global trend.
Swedish pools at the time required you to shower, naked [1], before entering the pool, and to use soap while showering, with special attention to the hair, armpits, crotch, and feet. This helps get rid of the dirt and urea (which when combined with chlorine makes the 'swimming pool smell'), keeping the pool clean and with little odor.
It is difficult to wash underwear with the same thoroughness. I have not seen people laundering their underwear before swimming.
[1] Our local pool changed to allow showering in one's bathing trunks. I personally don't like the rule, as I think people will skimp on washing their crotch before entering the pool.
Pools in Austria have signs asking you to shower before swimming, but not everyone does (lots of people with dry hair in the pool). Kids just run through the shower and jump right into the pool.
For some reason most pools don't have the strong smell that I remember from my childhood anymore. Either it's because they are better ventilated, or because they check the chlorine levels more diligently (they sample the water every hour or so), or maybe I'm just not as sensitive to smells anymore.
> The scientists calculated that one 220,000-gallon, commercial-size swimming pool contained almost 20 gallons of urine
After reading that NPR article, I can suggest another possible alternative; the pools might drain and refill their pools more often, rather than top-off when it gets low.
Dry hair might not be that good of an indicator? I mean, I see people doing breast stroke with their head completely out of the water.
Could be more pools are being bromine treated. A quick google search yields some (not super trustworthy) sources that seem to claim bromamines are less odoriferous than chloramines.
That's really sad. The article is also surprising to me because in my area there are a lot of public pools, many of which have been recently built. Staffing and maintenance isn't a problem either - for example [1]. I'm in the suburbs instead of the city, and the current trend is for every suburb to compete to have the nicest pool and amenities. The one nearest to me has water slides and a lazy river, a diving well that includes a 3-meter diving board, etc.
But if you want to know why they take swimming seriously, it's a safety issue: [2]
In places without good jobs that pay good salaries, people are either going to have to pay more taxes, or accept that the public services are going to suck :-/
Public pools in Austria are very cheap, because the pools are paid for by tax payers. Schools/students pay almost nothing to use them. Raising prices would be counterproductive, because the result would just be that even fewer students would learn to swim.
Generally said to be people who can swim who get into trouble and drown. People who can't stay out of the water. So if you can't swim you are missing out on fun but are probably safer in practice.
"No. I'm going to say you can't always avoid getting into water."
True but accidentally ending up in water is rare. Deliberately putting yourself in water because you can swim is common. I'd still rather swim personally, but if I stayed out of the sea I would be safer.
Two weeks ago we were at a local lake where lots of people go to swim. There was some commotion suddenly, with lots of people shouting around. Apparently someone disappeared. Then fire trucks showed up, divers jumped in the lake, the police blocked of a part of the lake, ambulances arrived.
The next day we read in the local paper that a 26 year old man had drowned. Apparently he was a poor swimmer. They found him at the bottom of the lake, just 30m from the shore.
The only way to prevent tragedies like this is to make sure every kid learns to swim.
That's a ridiculous statement. There are so many other skills that could save your life one day, not knowing how to do that particular one isn't any stupider than not knowing how to climb a tree to escape a bear.
I agree people should be given the opportunity to learn how to swim but let's look at reality for a moment: Worldwide, almost 60% of humans do not know how to swim and they still get by fine... Wild, isn't it?
Lots if people get by without knowing how to read too. That doesn't make it a good idea.
Like reading, knowing how to swim can save your life or the life of someone nearby. And swimming is much easier to learn than reading. There's no good reason not to learn to swim if you have access to a pool.
> Public pools are costly for cities to maintain and insure.
> Cities also have struggled to staff pools with lifeguards. High-school and college students have more summer job options and are less likely to pick up a job as a lifeguard over the summer than they once did, [Kevin Roth, vice president of research, evaluation and technology at the National Recreation and Park Association] said.
The article also doesn’t mention the rise of the “splash pad” as a cheaper and safer alternative for cooling off in the hot summer months.
Regarding the racial integration protests and violence that the article mentions, Mr. Rogers (coming along later) famously addressed this, to children:
There's an intriguing line in this article that I wish were explored further: what is the role of increasing liability and insurance costs in the withdrawal from public amenities?
Interesting that CNN mentioned Martin Luther King Jr in the article as the City of Atlanta spent a big chunk of downtown Atlanta's TAD (same thing as TIF) money on the MLK Aquatics Center. But the byline says it came from CNN's New York office so maybe they don't know much about Atlanta.
I also wonder if like so many other primarily outdoor activities (the MLK pool happens to be indoors), there's a generational decline in interest.
Around here we just drive to the lake or river. Who wants to swim in a public pool when you could swim in a lake or river with no rules? Better swimming in the lake, bridges and rope swingsbeat diving boards any day, and you can crack open a beer if you're so inclined.
Yeah, if "around here" means what I think it does, three people died recently doing just that because they hadn't learned how to swim properly. And while you can learn to do some basic swimming in a lake or a river, it's a lot easier to teach and learn it in a pool.
But nobody wants to go to public pools, given the option. With a public pool available, those people probably would have done the same thing. Nobody with a choice is going to a public pool.
Thinking about where I grew up, every public pool I went to was basically subsidized by being attached to hockey arenas. None of them are gone yet luckily.
