How the iconic North Sydney Olympic Pool put local council in deep financial debt

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It's seen 86 swimming and diving world records. It has hosted two Empire Games. And its 1930s architecture and harbourside location, beneath the rumbling Harbour Bridge railway and overseen by the grinning face of Luna Park, must place it near the top of any global list of spectacular sporting venues.
But lately the achievements at North Sydney Olympic Pool haven't been quite so magnificent.
When it finally ends, a two-year renovation budgeted at $57 million will have taken five years and cost $122 million.
It's put the local council $56 million in debt, prompting it to consider some unpopular methods of clawing back cash, like increasing rates by 90 per cent, charging people to watch New Year's Eve fireworks, and selling public streets to private schools.
The council has also had to curtail its public works budget and can't afford essential works like repairing leaking roofs at childcare and community centres.
All in one of the nation's wealthiest areas.
North Sydney Mayor Zoe Baker isn't happy about it.
As a councillor, Ms Baker voted against the pool redevelopment. As mayor, she has to find the cash to pay for it.
"Just in the last three years we've had to defer, each year, $12 million on capital works on council assets," she said.
This year the council is also trying to find $6 million in savings.
"The council agreed very reluctantly to ticket access for New Year's Eve and Blues Point Reserve, and that's in order to find $300,000 to offset the cost of delivery of New Year's Eve."
At the same council meeting, councillors had to choose between funding a seawall repair, or fixing North Sydney Oval's broken PA system.
Former North Sydney lap swimmer Clare Payne says the pool's once-tight community of early morning swimmers have lost touch with each other.
Closures for renovations at the other two nearest public pools — at Willoughby and Mrs Macquarie's Chair — have forced those swimmers even further apart.
Ms Payne was upset back in 2019 when the council announced the North Sydney pool would be closed for up to two years.
"That felt quite devastating." she told 7.30.
"I didn't really want to even process that because I thought this is just going to be too long. I hate the fact that it's closing like this, especially both pools."
The second pool was a 25-metre indoor pool that sat atop the grandstand designed by architect Ken Maher.
His 2001 redevelopment on the heritage grandstand won several architecture awards.
In 2019 the council announced it would be demolished, along with the entire grandstand.
Mr Maher said he was "shattered, frankly, and because it seemed to be for no really good reason".
The grandstand had concrete cancer — but Mr Maher says the building could have been saved.
"It wasn't falling down," he said.
"It may have meant that there was work that had to be done to repair the structure underneath that was suffering, but it's not unusual that concrete structures that are having concrete cancer are repaired."
The redevelopment was championed by then-mayor Jilly Gibson, who retired last year.
Jessica Keen is the sole remaining councillor who voted for the redevelopment. She says council staff made a business case for the pool, which she approved in good faith.
"I voted for a $60 million pool, not $122 million. There is a vast difference in that budget," she said.
An independent review of the project by accounting firm PWC found that the problems started even before work commenced.
Among the problems identified by the review:
The builder, Icon, says the council's design team have made hundreds of changes to the project.
Icon blames the council for the failure of structural steel in the new indoor pool building, atop the rebuilt grandstand. That steel had to be pulled down and replaced.
Icon and the council are also in a legal dispute over $28 million in cost overruns.
Mayor Baker says the scale of the project was always too much for council to take on.
"It started as a $28 million project. It morphed effectively on the floor of council into a $58 million project … there were literally councillors getting up on the floor of council and saying, 'I'd like a creche, and I would like this,' and so the scope of the brief was being expanded in an ad hoc way," Mayor Baker said.
"There was no reporting back about how much that would cost and how council would fund it."
Mayor Baker says the pool will be handed back to the council later this year and should be open to the public in the first quarter of 2026, once the fit-out is finished.
She is relieved the saga is finally coming to an end.
"For me it's bittersweet, because there's absolutely no satisfaction in 'I told you so,'" she said.
"I don't think the cost of that $122 million to our community for the things we've had to forego and the impossible decisions that we're now having to make because of the financial impacts is worth it.
"I was always an advocate for doing a much more modest approach to the pool redevelopment."
Mr Maher, the architect of the demolished 25m pool, doubts he'll be returning to swim at the rebuilt site.
"I don't think I'll go there. I think I'll just feel too negative about it," he said.
Does he have any sense of schadenfreude?
"I think the the tragedy of the project is the impact it's had on the community, no access to the pool for five years or more, huge increase in cost," he said.
Ms Payne, the former North Sydney pool swimmer, is looking forward to the reopening and trying the complex's new 25m indoor pools.
She sometimes swims at Balmoral, where the sea temperature is currently a chilly 15 degrees.
"It doesn't necessarily get any easier, I think, swimming in cold water. It's bracing, it's invigorating. But it will definitely be nice to get a pool back — especially an indoor pool."
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