Will Public Pool System Ever Be The Same Again?

The Washington Park pool. Photo by Alison Peterson.

Lifeguard recruitment continues to improve for Milwaukee County Parks, but it appears unlikely the county’s aquatic system will ever return to its former glory.

Low lifeguard numbers have limited how many pools are opened each summer. Recruitment has improved, and the department is expecting to have more guards this summer than it did in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, however, officials face a changing seasonal labor market and a budget that cannot support opening every pool in the system.

The Milwaukee County Board amended the 2025 budget last fall to add $600,000 for “enhancements” throughout the parks system. The department returned to the board’s Committee on Parks and Culture Tuesday with a breakdown of how it planned to spend the money, which included $70,000 for seasonal incentives for lifeguard and pool staff and $100,000 for aquatics facility maintenance.

The department doesn’t yet know how many deep-well pools, wading pools and splash pads it will open this summer. That remains dependent on how many lifeguards are recruited and how much maintenance these facilities need.

“We don’t know how far this $100,000 is going to go,” Deputy Parks Director Jim Tarantino said. “It’s really a matter of turning the pools on, filling the basins in April and May, and seeing what’s broken and needs to be fixed. That really informs how we make those decisions.”

The smaller facilities are easier to maintain and that’s likely where the additional funding will be spent. The deep-well pools can require significant, six-figure repairs, Tarantino said. The parks system has 8 outdoor deep-well pools, three water parks and two indoor deep-well pools. In the summer of 2024 the department opened five outdoor pools.

The Hales Corners Park Pool is one outdoor pool that has not opened for years. The area Sup. Patti Logsdon regularly advocates for its opening and a number of nearby residents provided public testimony during the 2025 budget process requesting the pool be opened. At the meeting Tuesday Logsdon asked if it would open in 2025.

“We don’t know which deep-well pool facilities, the outdoor pool facilities, are going to open this year,” Tarantino said.

The additional funding from the board brings the department’s seasonal labor budget in line with what it cost to open the same number of facilities as it did last year, which isn’t enough to open everything. Hales Corners Park Pool has strong advocates, but isn’t the only pool in the system that has sat empty for years. McCarty Park in West Allis and Washington Park in Milwaukee also have pools the department has been unable to open, Tarantino said.

Aquatics facilities do not generate anything close to self-sufficient revenue and rely on net income generated by the county golf system, food and beverage sales and event rentals. Most of this revenue has not been generated by the time the department is making decisions about which pools to open, “so we really have to live within our budget,” Tarantino noted.

Finally, everything remains dependent on lifeguard recruitment. Andrea Wallace, assistant director of recreation and business services, told supervisors the department has 80 returning guards and 24 new guards that have passed swim tests. At the current rate, Wallace said the department expects to have at least 137 guards.

The burgeoning lifeguard corps is an improvement, and a reversal of the declining lifeguard numbers that began before the pandemic, which sent them plummeting as pools and training sessions were shut down for a year. Greater recruitment, bonuses and pay increases — county lifeguards now start at $17.47 an hour — have helped.

But a greater share of guards are only interested in working part-time, around 15 to 25 hours a week, as they balance other commitments to athletics, school or internships. The result is that the system now needs more lifeguards per pool to maintain its openings. In 2019, roughly the same number of guards were able to open nearly double the facilities the county opened in 2024, Wallace said.

Looking ahead, if recruitment keeps rising, county policymakers will also have to consider greater and greater funding for the aquatics system. Sup. Steve Taylor said he thought his colleagues were reaching a fork in the road for aquatics policy, noting that the county’s long-term financial estimates do not suggest there will additional funding for more pools and seasonal staff in the future.

“If I was a doctor, I would say the prognosis is not good, long term, of us getting to where we were ever at before,” Taylor said, “and I think we have to start facing that reality.”