SANTA CLARA — It’s been more than a year since the city shuttered the renowned George F. Haines International Swim Center over safety concerns, displacing hundreds of local swimmers and divers as the city grappled with what to do about the long-neglected facility. Now, the city is embarking on a huge undertaking to restore the historic aquatic center and extend its lifespan for another 30 years.

The unanimous decision by the Santa Clara City Council to rehabilitate the center has been decades in the making for many who have used the facility since it opened in 1967 and recognized the pivotal role it’s played on the international swimming stage.

Michael Phelps competes in the men’s 200 meter butterfly on day three of the 2015 Arena Pro Swim Series at the George F. Haines International Swim Center on June 20, 2015 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Don Feria/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 557711275 

“I think that today has been a very good day for acknowledging history and contributions from the past,” Councilmember Kevin Park said at the meeting this week approving the move.

The swim center — which was renamed in 2000 after the late U.S. Olympic swimming coach and founder of the Santa Clara Swim Club, George F. Haines — served as the training ground for some of the greatest Olympic swimmers of the 20th century. Twenty-three world records have been set there — the most recent by a 17-year-old Michael Phelps in 2003.

The facility also has been the home to the Santa Clara Artistic Swimming Club, formerly known as the Aquamaids, whose past head coach, Chris Carver, also trained several Olympic artistic swimming teams at the swim center.

But the three pools — a 17-foot deep diving well, a 50-meter competition pool and a shallower pool largely used by a learn-to-swim program — along with the locker rooms and other structures started showing signs of wear and tear years ago. It reached a breaking point in January 2024 after an inspection of the facility found critical safety issues that forced the city to close the swim center indefinitely.

Swimmers practice at the International Swim Center Santa Clara, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 28, 2022. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group) 

Five months later, the council decided to pursue an $1.8 million temporary solution. They opted to replaster and reopen two of the three pools, install new exterior fencing and add portable showers and bathrooms while they searched for a long-term plan.

The diving well, however, would remain closed because the structural damage of that pool and the diving tower was too extensive. City officials at the time also warned there was no guarantee that the pool’s mechanical equipment, which had failed on multiple occasions in recent years, would continue working.

In January 2025, three weeks into the $1.8 million project, contractors hit a roadblock when they found “unforeseen damage to the pool’s gutter and apron infrastructure,” according to a city report. The discovery led city officials to reimagine the project and expand the scope, which they were able to do in large part because of the passage of Measure I last November — a $400 million infrastructure bond that has funds earmarked for the city’s aquatic facilities.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the council decided to move forward with the first of two phases to renovate the facility. Phase 1 will include replacing the pool deck, plumbing, gutters and the boilers for all three pools. The main 50-meter pool also will be reconfigured to increase the depth so it meets international racing standards, and the dive tower will be replaced or refurbished. City officials expect it to cost $10 million and noted infrastructure projects like this typically take 34 months, though the timeline could be shortened by up to a year.

The council also approved a declaration of urgency for the first phase of the project that will cut through some red tape — a mechanism that Mayor Lisa Gillmor said she doesn’t recall the city utilizing in the past.

“When I was walking precincts for Measure I that’s the first thing that our community said, ‘I’ll support it because I want a new swim center,’” Gillmor said. “That was the first thing that anybody wanted to talk about because I don’t think you realize how important it is to the community until it’s gone. And when it’s gone, people are just really upset because they rely on it. That’s the only reason I’m supporting this urgency matter.”

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The action taken by the council on Tuesday night also received approval from both Santa Clara Swim Club head coach Kevin Zacher and Todd Spohn, the head coach of Santa Clara Diving.

Zacher said that when the infrastructure bond first passed last year, the club imagined a new facility that would better meet the need “in terms of international meets and events” than the plan presented this week. But not having a place for the club to train, he said, has been a “hardship.”

“This is the quickest path for us to get back to a stable place at the ISC. It’s been meeting our needs the last 50+ years, it will meet our needs moving forward,” Zacher said. “Would we want something a little bit more? Sure. But I don’t think this precludes the possibility of potentially adding to the facility in the future to make it more amenable to those things.”

The project also received support from USA Diving President Lee Michaud who in a letter to the city stated, it “represents an extraordinary opportunity to not only restore the legacy of a historic aquatic venue but to provide a world-class facility that serves the local community, athletes and competitive teams at the highest levels.”

The swim center is one of two facilities in the Bay Area that can host community diving events, according to Spohn. The other is more than 70 miles away in Novato.

The second phase of the project, which will be approved at a later date, is expected to include the construction of all new lockers rooms, storage rooms and other administrative buildings, along with the restoration of the bleacher canopy.