After reports of many bathing deaths, the debate about swimming skills and the closure of communal baths is gathering pace. “Unfortunately, Bavaria is a sad pioneer when it comes to swimming deaths this year,” said Landtag President Ilse Aigner during a visit to the water rescue service at Chiemsee over the weekend. Aigner, who is also the patron of the “Bavaria Swims” campaign, expressed concern about the number of deployments and the numerous swimming accidents, more than in any other federal state. According to the German Life Saving Society (DLRG) and media reports, at least 33 people drowned in Bavaria in 2021. The DLRG referred to the pools that were closed for a long time due to Corona: “A complete school year did not learn how to swim safely.” In any case, the DLRG regularly warns – even before the pandemic – that the swimming skills of the population, especially children, are poor.
In the meantime, a catching-up process has begun: The state government sponsors “Seahorse” vouchers, private swimming schools have hardly any free places, the campaign also offers online videos and encourages people to learn to swim , Clubs and volunteers are active. Minister of Education Michael Piazolo (FW) sees a “task for society as a whole”, one should “not just relocate this to the school; that shortens it too much. Classically, it is the case that one learns to swim in the family”.
But above all of this hovers the question of whether there are enough indoor and outdoor swimming pools to learn to swim, whether for school lessons, parents, commercial providers or volunteer courses. Dozens of baths in Bavaria have closed over the years – it is not uncommon for them to be built in the 1970s and, as it is said, have “reached their lifecycle”. Or to put it more drastically: technology is out of date, the condition is ailing, the big crumbling – until at some point nothing works anymore.
At the start of the swimming campaign recently in Freising, Wasserwacht and Bavarian Red Cross (BRK) called on cities and municipalities to maintain their pools. BRK state manager Leonhard Stark spoke of a “pool dying” and the “creeping loss of swimming opportunities”. Stark appealed to municipalities not to close dilapidated bathrooms, but to renovate them or even build new ones. This is a common announcement from state politics as well.
Such demands meet with criticism at the congregation day. In any case, in debates it is “the new way of pointing a finger at the municipalities”, says the President and Abensberg Mayor Uwe Brandl (CSU). Of course, every bathroom is important, but the communities now have to keep an eye on and finance the entire infrastructure. And bathrooms are expensive. It is unreasonable for the citizens to run them with cost-covering entrance fees. A bathroom is “a company with ongoing deficits”, hundreds of thousands of euros a year that could quickly become. In addition, there is the need for renovation in many places, which municipalities can no longer afford, so that it comes to closure. Mayors have to decide what has priority in the portfolio. That could sometimes be the question: renovation of a kindergarten or indoor swimming pool?
In 2018 the state government launched a special swimming pool subsidy program. A wide range of baths in the communities is also a prerequisite for children to be able to learn to swim safely, it said. However, since a considerable number is in need of renovation and funds cannot be generated from the company, they want to help “reduce the renovation backlog”. For 2019 and 2020, 20 million euros have been earmarked for this in the budget, the program should run for a total of six years (further funding can be specifically applied for for school sports pools). “20 million euros, that’s not even a drop in the bucket. That’s basically nothing,” says Uwe Brandl about the program.
In the state parliament, the opposition recently reprimanded the narrow budget. The funding is not even enough to build a single bathroom, said Diana Stachowitz (SPD). “The municipalities need support in order to be able to guarantee the maintenance at all. That is all way too short-sighted.” And Max Deisenhofer (Greens) now announced with a view to the bathing dead: “It is not enough to give out a voucher for the seahorse if there is no swimming pool on site, the waiting lists are overrun or the rescue organizations and swimming clubs do not get any water times.” The government should “not shift everything onto the municipalities, especially not when it comes to life and death.”
Current data on the renovation backlog are not available. Markus Rinderspacher (SPD) had asked the government in writing several times, most recently in 2018. There were 863 public baths, every second one was in need of renovation, 55 were so ailing that they were threatened with closure. National cost estimate: up to one billion euros. There is no new status, at the request of the Greens the government recently referred to the data from 2018. Another query was “disproportionate”.
Incidentally, there is also a lack of data in school lessons. According to the Ministry of Culture, it is not possible to make a statement about actually held swimming lessons. The teachers’ association BLLV complains that there are no indoor swimming pools in many places or that they are quite far away from schools – all at the expense of swimming lessons.