Why doesn’t Salem have a public pool?

Someone asked this question on Reddit a couple of years ago, and the most upvoted response was “We can't even keep the library open.”

lol

Some are surprised to learn that of all the pools in Salem, none of them are public. 

Daniel Evans has been making the argument for public pools for decades. He coached at South Salem High School, taught swim lessons at most of the pools in this town, and said he personally helped raise $20,000 toward building the Kroc Center. 

"I cannot stress to you how many meetings I've gone to where people are misinformed and they think that we have the most pools in the area and we don't need any more pools," he told me. "Somebody mentioned Madrona Swim Club. People go, 'Well, there's 10 neighborhood pools in Salem. There's like six alone in Keizer.' Yeah, you have all the pools, right? But again, you have to be a member."

When people say "public pool," they usually mean something specific, even if they can't articulate it: a place owned by the city, kept open with tax dollars, where a family of four can drop in on a Tuesday in February for the cost of a couple coffees. No membership. No application. No annual dues. No wait-list.

That's the definition that matters for this story, because by that definition, Salem doesn't have one. 

We have the Kroc, the Y, Illahe, Creekside, the Courthouse Clubs, and a large collection of neighborhood pools. 

While we can look around and see smaller cities in our region who have managed to maintain, or even recently invest in, their own public pools. The decline of public pools is a national phenomenon.

When Salem's new YMCA was being built, leadership had to decide whether to include a pool. They did, but as a private nonprofit, it runs on memberships, not tax dollars.

Travis Hughes, COO of the YMCA of Marion and Polk Counties, told me most communities that keep public pools open do it through some mix of bonds, levies, and nonprofit partnerships. "In most cases, the fees associated with accessing a pool only cover a small portion of the true cost of operations."

And to be honest, our city seems more curious about the lack of a public pool than passionate about needing one. 

Salem didn't skip the hybrid model, but the version it tried was destined to fail. 

The city didn't just close Leslie, Walker, and Olinger and walk away. With Olinger, Salem actually tried a hybrid model.

The difference is who paid for what. In Silverton, the city owns the building and covers capital repairs while the YMCA runs operations. In Salem, the arrangement looked very different. According to the Statesman Journal editorial "Olinger Pool needs the community's help to stay open and relevant," the school district's contract with Mid-Valley Aquatics, the nonprofit that took over operations in 2012, spelled out that the district was responsible only for normal exterior wear-and-tear: parking lot maintenance, building surfaces, roofing, and the water supply to the building. "All other expenses," the article reported, "are borne by Mid-Valley Aquatics."

That meant a volunteer-run nonprofit was on the hook for everything that actually keeps a pool running, lifeguards, chemicals, the HVAC system, leak repairs, and a utility bill that president Geoff Tiffany told the Statesman Journal ran more than $1,000 a month, inflated by aging equipment that constantly needed repair. The school district, the article noted, did not provide operating funds.

The most telling detail of Salem’s current public pool-less reality isn't that voters have rejected the idea, it’s that they haven’t been given a chance to say "yes." In a sharp departure from the proactive spirit of the 1950s, modern city leadership has systematically left aquatics off the ballot during major funding opportunities. 

Even as voters approved a $300 million bond in 2022 and a $14 million annual levy in 2025 to rescue the library and parks, pools were absent from the priority lists, losing out to projects like pickleball courts and basic maintenance.

I’ll say it again. Our city seems more curious about the lack of a public pool than passionate about needing one. 

This era of exclusion traces back to the 2009 Olinger Pivot, when the city chose to exit the pool business entirely rather than seeking a public lifeline. Because current levies are earmarked only to sustain existing services, a new public pool would require its own dedicated ask, and that ask has not been put in front of voters in a generation.

The story of the American public pool summarized in two acts:

Act One: The New Deal boom. 

Between 1933 and 1938, the federal government built nearly 750 public pools and remodeled hundreds more. A 1933 leisure survey found Americans went swimming about as often as they went to the movies. Pools became, as historian Jeff Wiltse put it in his book Contested Waters, emblems of a "distinctly modern version of the good life that valued leisure, pleasure and beauty." Salem's Leslie and Olinger pools, both opened in the 1930s, were textbook examples of that wave. So were thousands of other municipal pools that small and mid-sized American cities wear today like fading tattoos.

Act Two: The replacement reckoning.

The pools built in the New Deal boom are now hitting 80, 90, even 100 years old. The pools built in the post-war municipal expansion are hitting 50, the age at which you're not patching anymore, you're rebuilding. Cities everywhere are deciding whether to write the eight-figure check.

In 2017, Andy Zimmerman wrote an article for the Statesman Journal titled Heritage: Olinger 'pool' has drawn swimmers for decades.

In it he broke down a history of swimming in Salem. Here is a summary:

The site we now call Olinger has been Salem's swimming spot for nearly 150 years. Long before any pool was built, kids cooled off in three named swimming holes along Mill Creek, Big Giant, Little Giant, and Old Live, going back to the 1880s. 

By 1928, the athletic fields next to the creek were named for Dr. H.H. Olinger, chairman of the Salem School Board and a champion of local athletics. By the early 1930s, Salem had dredged part of Mill Creek to seven feet of depth under a diving board and was running supervised swimming six days a week with regular Friday meets.

In November 1933, county, city, and school board officials began drafting proposals for a real swimming pool. The following month, they approved plans for two pools at a combined cost of around $20,000, one at Olinger and one near Leslie Middle School. Construction was rushed, with crews working double shifts to finish before summer. Olinger Pool opened on Monday, June 18, 1934, timed to the American Red Cross learn-to-swim campaign. The Capital Journal reported that 800 registration cards were exhausted within hours as kids and adults flooded in; volunteer workers signed up swimmers as fast as they could fill out the paperwork. Some classes had 200 students in the water at once. The Oregon Statesman counted 1,366 people registered on opening day alone. The heating system wasn't working that day. Nobody seemed to mind.

By the 1950s, safety problems again threatened to close the pool, but Salem voters approved a two-year levy to refurbish both Olinger and Leslie. When Olinger reopened on July 30 of that year, free swimming was over: 10 cents for elementary kids, 20 cents for high schoolers, 35 cents for adults. The public era continued.

On August 28, 1971, Olinger closed for the last time as an outdoor pool to be converted into an indoor facility. The reopening was supposed to happen in mid-January 1972 but was delayed by 16 separate leaks that had to be patched before the pool could be filled. It finally reopened February 13, 1972, beginning a new era of year-round swimming at Olinger, and beginning a recurring battle with leaks that would haunt the facility for the next half century.

The Slow Leak: 2009–Present. Olinger was operated for decades by the City of Salem under an agreement with the Salem-Keizer Public Schools district. That agreement ended in 2009 due to budget cuts. The pool didn't close. It got handed off. And in 2020, during a North Salem High School remodel, it was filled in. Olinger Pool, as a physical place, no longer exists.

This is the part that Salem’s pool advocates don't always lead with.

According to industry data compiled by USA Management:

Katrina Gannon-Peterson worked at Olinger as the shift manager and head lifeguard when they closed. She told me, “We shared tons of ideas around how the city hadn’t raised prices in years. It was seriously $2.50 for an adult to swim when most other cities were at $7-8 at the time…And they continuously said ‘we can’t make money and are always in the red.’ It felt like they refused to look at other cities whose public works departments managed to successfully maintain public pools.”

The honest answer: somewhere between $20 million and $60 million to build, plus $1–2 million a year to operate.

Here's what comparable Pacific Northwest projects have actually cost:

Newberg (Chehalem Aquatic & Fitness Center): Voters passed a $19.9 million bond in 2014 to replace their aging pool with a new state-of-the-art facility. In 2026 dollars, that project would run closer to $26–28 million.

Woodburn: Currently doing a $20 million renovation/expansion of their existing aquatic center, funded by a $15 million state lottery bond plus $5 million in parks system development charges. Notably, Woodburn voters rejected a $40 million bond for a bigger version in November 2024 before the city pivoted to the smaller scope. 

With all of the needs we have in our city, and how expensive a new pool would be to build and operate, I don't pretend there's an easy answer. But 'it's expensive' is not the same thing as 'it's not worth doing.' Should Salem be having this conversation? Or do we already have enough to argue about?

Daniel has watched Salem voters reject pool measure after pool measure. His read on why isn't cynical, it's tactical.

"When we stand alone, we get shot down every time. So when we go to those budget meetings and try to get something put in, we tie it to something that we're really passionate about, a senior center, or even the homeless situation. But it's so different because it's tied to schools. So these other important groups don't get what they need as well."

That's the political problem Salem public pool supporters haven’t solved: a stand-alone pool measure won't pass, and a bundled measure forces aquatics to compete with whichever priority is currently on fire. The 1950s levy worked because Salem voters were asked a clean question about pools and gave a clean answer. Nobody has tried that in a generation.

The case that "Salem just doesn't need one because we have so many pools" is straightforwardly wrong. We have private clubs, members-only fitness centers, and one Salvation Army-run facility. We do not have a public pool. 

Did we somehow manage to sleepwalk into being the only mid-sized Oregon city without one? Or did we all just quietly accept that the options we already have are sufficient?

Salem isn't unique in struggling with the value proposition of a public pool. But we should at least decide it on purpose, with the actual numbers on the table, not because we drove past Madrona Swim Club and confused a private membership for a public service.