When the Randallstown Community Center opened in 2009, Baltimore County and the Y of Central Maryland didn’t settle for a traditional ribbon cutting.
Instead, they went with a big splash. Neighborhood kids jumped in and played ball, The Baltimore Sun reported. Senior citizens showed off water aerobics. And public officials declared the building — paid for with $10 million in county funds and $3 million in state dollars — a win-win for the county’s often-neglected west side. Leased by the Y for a $1 a year, the pool promised to increase water safety for Black youths as well as promote fitness for seniors.
Sixteen years later, the complex — and that promise — are showing their age.
Baltimore County does not have a single public pool that is free to residents, while the city of Baltimore has 16 — several of which are newly renovated, thanks to $41 million in COVID-19 relief funds.
The Randallstown Y offers discounted pool memberships at a loss, Y officials said, but it isn’t free. Even its designated public swim times, just two a week, come with a cost to residents — close to $20 for a family of four. Plus, members complain the locker room is tiny, the bleacher area unused and the pool deck small — all of which the Y would like to renovate, but cannot, because it does not own the building.
As the county faces questions about its lack of swimming opportunities, now mostly found at private clubs and apartment complexes, the Randallstown Y ‘s arrangement makes some wonder why more aren’t provided by the county.
“Why do people need a Y membership for a pool that we paid for, and we built?” asked County Councilman Julian Jones, a Democrat.
Jones would like to see the county develop aquatic centers, like Anne Arundel County, and have them centrally located so residents don’t have to drive far.
“As a government, we can run a pool, and we can make it available to the citizens,” he added.
Losing money every year
Most weekdays mornings, swim instructor Alysha Lea greets her regulars with quick hellos before getting down to business. Thirty women and one man, all Black, punch their fists in sync with Lea to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My head.”
“To the right! To the left!” calls out Lea, a retired veteran, as 30 bathing caps rotate.
Most know each other, said Sara Milstein, the Y’s chief marketing and brand experience officer. When someone shows up after missing classes, others always ask after them.
“We talk all the time about building community, and what you see here is community in action,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing and it doesn’t happen that much in society.”
About 30% of the Randallstown Y’s members come through the Y’s Open Doors Program, which allows them to pay a fraction of the regular membership cost. That can be as low as $19 a month. The Y offers regular memberships for different ages; family memberships run $84 a month.
The Y contributes $200,000 a year to help low-income members and fundraises so it never has to turn anyone away, said Derrick Fletcher, the organization’s chief operating officer. The Y also offers daily access for free to busloads of senior citizens from county centers. All of that comes out of Y coffers.
“You can walk into a Y and you see folks and you have no idea what membership they’re paying,’” Fletcher said. “There is this assumption that the pools are not accessible or that it’s cost-prohibitive, but that is not the case.”
Tiny locker rooms, long delays
The regulars in Lea’s classes can’t say enough about their love for the Y.
Jeanette Simon, 72, and Donna Mitchell, 74, come to the Wet and Sweat class five days a week. Simon has lost 18 pounds; Mitchell‘s dropped 25.
“A year go, my brother died, and I committed to him before he passed to get in shape,” Simon said.
But, members concede, things could be better.
The locker room has space for maybe five adults, not the 30 who descend on it when class ends. The Y only manages the swim center; the county manages the rest of the building, which includes a gym, but little else. In underused offices, the Y would love to run exercise classes. The few elliptical machines that the Y placed in a community room are insufficient.
Joyce Smith once enjoyed walking on the building’s indoor track. However, she said, the county doesn’t staff the room, and many of Randallstown’s adult day care centers drop off their clients and do not supervise them. Smith said she’s been shoved while walking.
“There has to be a better way to do that,” she said of the county’s management. “This is a senior citizen place, and a lot of us are hesitant to walk.”
Baltimore County Communications Director Erica Palmisano said in a statement: “Department staff are responsible for supervising the facility and are always available to assist with questions or concerns. Site staff have, as needed, contacted police for assistance and removed individuals from the facility.”
As for the locker room, Palmisano said Randallstown residents asked in 2023 for a series of improvements estimated to cost $3.4 million.
“There are no construction dollars budgeted for this major capital improvement at this time,” she said.
Five years for repairs
Fissures in the Y-county partnership extend to the Dundalk Y, on the county’s east side, where the county also owns the building.
Unlike in Randallstown, where the county built the pool, the Dundalk pool already existed. But the county has invested substantially over several decades to maintain it while the Y managed the pool, trained lifeguards and ran programming. Then, in 2020, the pool cracked and water flooded the basement.
The pool closed for five years for renovations, with the county contributing $3.26 million, Palmisano said.
During that time, aquatics options were limited. The nearby Sparrows Point Country Club is expensive, and the private Kids First Swim School offers limited hours. Some residents used to cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge to swim at the Y in Pasadena, but after the bridge collapse last year, that 15-minute drive ballooned to more than an hour.
Fletcher said the Y offered to manage the construction project for the county, but officials declined. The Y has built entire facilities in less time than it took for the county to repair the pool.
Despite those hiccups, the plan was never for the county to run the pools and make them free, as the city does with its pools, according to Don Mohler, who was chief of staff for then-County Executive Jim Smith when the Randallstown and Dundalk pools were dedicated. Though the county once had a plan to build and manage pools, it backed off those planned investments after integration began in earnest in the 1970s.
Black children die of drowning-related accidents at two to three times the rates of white children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2024. Advocates say that can be attributed to a lack of access stemming from segregation.
Those legacies last into adulthood. Mitchell, who is almost 75, just started taking swim lessons because she didn’t know how and thought she might drown during a Wet and Sweat class.
The imperfect solution of a nonprofit that knows how to run pools and a county that sometimes has the resources to fund them does not change the fundamental problem: That more than 70 years after the county first planned to build several swimming pools at elementary schools, it still doesn’t have one public pool where its 850,000 residents can learn to swim for free.
That concerns advocates like Rahim Booth, a longtime swim instructor, coach and advocate for increased opportunities for Black children through Diversity in Aquatics, a national nonprofit that promotes water safety.
“I understand it costs a lot to run an aquatic facility,” he said, “but that should not restrict the ability to have water safety and swim classes for all.”
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