With 60,500 gallons of water leaking from the McGaugh School pool every day, and the nearby tennis courts becoming unstable, the Los Alamitos Unified School District and the City of Seal Beach are trying to determine what to do, and who will pay for it. Nobody seems to know how long the pool has been leaking, but it must be costing the city a—shall we say—a pool full of cash.
The pool and tennis courts are on district property, which presumably means the district owns these facilities, but school district Superintendent Dr. Gregory Franklin wrote in a letter to the City of Seal Beach “The school district does not use the pool or the tennis courts, but makes them available to the City for parks and recreation. The tennis courts have also been available to the public. Since the school district does not use these facilities, the City has funded their maintenance.”
Seal Beach City Engineer, Michael Ho, told www.OC180NEWS.com the problem surfaced because the district intended to remove the tennis courts and use the area for 63 parking places. In the process of preparing to work on the new parking area, it was determined that the ground was saturated and unfit for building a parking lot. The source of the water was traced to the pool’s supply and return pipes. Ho indicated the shell of the pool is intact and not the source of the leaks.
Ho didn’t know how long the pool has been leaking or how much money the wasted water is costing the city. He indicated the city bills the school district for the water used by the school, but there is a separate meter for the pool and the district is not billed for this meter. That, of course, does not mean the wasted water is free. The city buys its water—not to mention the drought.
Further complicating matters is the fact that some local residents do not want to see the tennis courts converted into parking spaces. The district is in the process of wrapping up a major renovation of McGaugh School and the tennis court/parking lot conversion was to be one of the final phases of the project. But, with 60,500 gallons of water saturating the area every 24 hours, apparently the district cannot move forward with the parking lot.
The present state of affairs is that the district will hold off on the parking lot and will work with the city on a plan for both the pool and tennis courts. That will be the easy part. The hard part will be coming up with the money. Franklin wrote in his letter to the city “The District will continue to work with the City on the issues at McGaugh for the benefit of the community. At this time, the District will take no action on the pool or tennis courts as we enter into the master planning process. The district’s guiding principle in that process is that educational dollars cannot be spent on purely recreational facilities like the pool and tennis courts.”
As the district and the city work out a long term solution, Seal Beach City Manager David Carmany told www.OC180NEWS.com the city has hired a pool consulting firm to assess the situation. “We are going to report back to the {city} council on what, if anything, can be done short term to try and plug the leaks.”
In the mean time, a whole lot of water is wasted every day. The pool is operating normally, which means every minute, the auto-fill system adds about 42 gallons of water to keep the pool full. City Engineer Ho told www.OC180NEWS.com, there are currently no plans to drain the pool. In fact, he did not know whose call that would be.
Ho said he estimated the daily water loss of 60,500 gallons by watching the flow meter as it ran for a minute. A loss of 42 gallons per minute, which is the amount he observed, equates to 60,480 gallons per 24 hour period.
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About Dolores Barr, Publisher
Dolores Barr has lived in Rossmoor since 1992 and has created this site to provide local news for the people of Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Rossmoor, Leisure World, Sunset Beach, and Surfside, California. My husband and I have had two students graduate from the Los Alamitos Unified School District and currently our Grandson, Ricky Apodaca, grade 3 at Weaver Elementary, is actively involved in youth baseball through LAYB and youth football through FNL.
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