After receiving the City Council’s vote of approval Tuesday night, Long Beach will start work on a new Belmont Beach and Aquatics Center to replace the temporary Belmont Pool, a project that has languished for years and been repeatedly scaled back because of budgetary and regulatory issues.
The center is planned at the old site of the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool, which was permanently closed over 10 years ago and then demolished in December 2014 due to seismic issues.
The new pool has gone through multiple redesigns and is now expected to cost $74.2 million. Prior versions of the pool design were projected to cost as much as $145 million.
The city had already downsized the pool plans once, settling on a design that would cost $119 million, but even that project “was beyond our capability,” City Manager Tom Modica said Tuesday.
Modica said the city planned to pay for the $119 million version of the pool with money that included $50 million in bonds backed by the city’s oil revenue, but that plan was complicated by a state law that may restrict the city’s oil production by creating large buffer zones where drilling is banned around schools, parks and hospitals.
The law (Senate Bill 1137) will be on the November 2024 ballot for voters to decide. If it passes it could cost the city over $20 million per year in lost oil revenue. Over half of the city’s oil operations are within the 3,200-foot buffers mandated by the law.
City officials unveiled the most recent version of the pool project to the public in June and said the more modest design about because of a lack of funding and a realization that not every community need would be met by the project.
With the City Council’s vote on Tuesday, Long Beach will now move forward with design, permitting and bidding for the $74.2 million project.
Modica was careful to say that the renderings shown publicly might differ from what is actually sent to the California Coastal Commission for its approval in the coming months.
This week, Long Beach is asking the Coastal Commission to extend its previously approved development permit for the pool, but the city will still have to re-submit the new design once it’s completed. Modica said construction could begin as soon as the spring of 2025.
Members of the aquatic sports community supported the vote, saying the new pool would serve the city better than the current temporary pool and potentially inspire a new generation of swimmers.
“We commit to give our hardest in practice and not waste the pool,” said Mason Patel, an 11-year-old member of the Rocket Fish swim team.
However, activists who have challenged the project for the past 10 years remained opposed to spending 10s of millions in public funds for a facility they’ve said would only benefit an affluent part of the city.
“It was designed in a location that is in the richest, whitest corner of Long Beach with the least amount of kids,” said Anna Christensen, who, along with others, has advocated for the pool to be located somewhere other than Belmont Shore.
Even with the pool’s scaled-back design, the city still has a funding gap of about $8 million. And if the new structure is to have seating, shade structures and more restroom capacity, the city may need to find another $3.7 million in additional funding as well.
Originally, the pool was proposed to have a much grander scale, with a large translucent dome, multiple pools, play areas for non-competitive swimming and facilities that could potentially host high-profile events.
However, legal challenges from community groups, inflation, seismic compliance costs and changes mandated by the California Coastal Commission, which has jurisdiction over coastal developments, prolonged the process and helped push up the cost of the project.
The design approved Tuesday has two pools: one that’s 50 meters with diving boards and another that’s ain instructional pool intended for swim lessons. It also has a recreation area with zip lines and climbing walls.
The domed version included two Olympic-sized pools and a diving well in addition to recreational swim areas. The version approved by the Coastal Commission in February 2021 also had more bodies of water and amenities than what was ultimately approved Tuesday, but council members were supportive of it with multiple members saying it’s what the city could realistically afford.
“It’s a project that can be delivered to the community for the community and it will serve hundreds of thousands of visitors,” said Councilmember Kristina Duggan, who represents the area where the pool will be built.