The City of McCall is joining an international effort to make sure rivers, lakes, oceans and estuaries are safe for urban swimmers.
It all started when Paris tried to clean the river Seine ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, kicking off a global conversation on people’s right to safely swim in public urban waterways. A year later, McCall joined 83 cities around the world — including Vienna, Johannesburg, Seoul and Baltimore — across 30 countries in signing the “Swimmable Cities” charter.
“It's a global alliance and sort of a new grassroots movement,” said McCall Community and Economic development director Michelle Groenevelt, as she presented the initiative at Thursday’s council meeting. “It's about being able to swim in urban places with clean water.”
“It's kind of an underrepresented, recreational group within our community because there's not really an industry behind it,” she added, saying joining the alliance would encourage the town to keep swimmers’ needs in mind.
Payette Lake and the Payette River are already hot spots for recreational activities, like boating and kayaking. But by signing up to the charter, McCall would commit to keeping waterways clean and designating areas specifically for urban swimming.
“I very much think about the no wake zone and buoys and ensuring that we have safe places for people to open water swim,” she said, adding the alliance would provide technical expertise. Plus, [...] it does put us in a position of really thinking and being maybe even more intentional about that kind of usage within our water bodies.”
The council voted unanimously to join.
