Tired Tepid Baths

The tired Tepid Baths need a bigger pool - a funding pool, that is.

Peeling and dated paintwork, narrow lanes and exposed pipes and struts characterise the downtown swimming centre, built in 1914 and showing its age.

Auckland City Council has been asking the public what they want to see happen but there isn't enough in the bank to do much for now. There's only $3.3 million to spend on the baths this year and council officers say they will need to find more money to go ahead with redevelopment.

Pool users say renovation is badly needed but they don't want any fancy bells and whistles such as hydroslides or wave pools.

``It just needs to be cleaned up a bit. Other than that, I think it should stay the same,' says Debra Phillips-Brown, of Herne Bay, who brings her children here every week for lessons.

Fellow mum Robyn Ancell, of Grey Lynn, agrees. ``The pool part's fantastic, but it's a bit tired,' she says.

``I've brought people here who haven't been in years and years, and they remark on how it hasn't changed at all.'

She has been coming here at least once a week for the past two years, and says she wouldn't keep coming if she didn't like the place.

Unlike the others, she also says she has no trouble finding parking. All she wants is a new coffee machine, lamenting that one disappeared last year.

Jim Bourke says the pools need wider lanes. He used the Newmarket pools before moving into town a month ago and says the Tepid Baths' lanes don't measure up.

When it's busy, he says, it's hard to avoid knocking into other pool users. He thinks the toilets and changing rooms need doing up, but nothing too drastic. ``It would be a pity to lose its heritage, especially the outside,' he says.

With more city apartments, use of the Tepid Baths has grown considerably in the past five years.

Outside the city centre, other pools are feeling a drought. The busiest pool in the city, Mt Albert Aquatic Centre, struggles to make ends meet.

Plans to add a special learners' pool have been hampered by lack of funds. Although the pool is teeming with swimmers - each year it gets 100,000 more visitors than it was built for - Auckland City Council is putting new pools at Otahuhu and Avondale first.

Manager Paul Kite says the Mt Albert centre is probably the most-used pool of its size of any in the country, operating at 98.5 per cent capacity on any given day.

Mr Kite thinks people are possibly steering clear of the Mt Albert centre because of overcrowding. For years, locals have been waiting for a special learn-to-swim pool, making do with a portable pool that Mr Kite introduced. ``It's about one-sixteenth the size I'd actually like,' he says.

Building an extra pool would also free up the main pool for lane swimming. While $9.9 million has been allocated to a new Avondale pool for 2015, and $16 million to a new Otahuhu pool for 2011, nothing has been allocated to Mt Albert. Glen Innes Fitness and Aquatic Centre and Cameron Pool in Mt Roskill are also suffering from too many visitors and too little money.

Mr Kite says while other pools' entrance fees have risen substantially in the seven years he's worked in Auckland City, the Mt Albert rates haven't changed at all. ``We used to be $5 or $6 more expensive than the other pools because of the special features, but now we're only $1.50 different,' he says.

Pt Erin (Herne Bay) pools are due for a do-up but also are short of money.