The city is planning to tighten its ordinance regarding fences around swimming pools after a toddler drowned at a local apartment complex.

"The idea is to keep little kids from wiggling through or crawling under fences," said Shannon Smith, executive director of the City Council.Randy Hart, a Murray assistant city attorney, said the stiffer city regulation would mandate any new public swimming pool be surrounded by a fence at least 6 feet high with spaces between rails no bigger than 4 inches across. It would also require a self-closing gate on such fences. Public pools are defined as those used by more than three families.

The proposal - , which will be aired at a 6:30 p.m. City Council meeting on Tuesday, June 16 - comes a month after 3-year-old Emily Paige Telford slipped between the bars of a swimming-pool fence at Murray's Cloverland Apartments, 530 W. Murray Blvd., and fell into the pool. She was pulled from the water by her brothers but died the next day at Primary Children's Medical Center.

The incident triggered angry public reaction among residents of the apartment complex, who said the property managers had known of the danger. The apartment owners, in turn, said they had never been cited for violating a county pool-fence ordinance practically identical to the one Murray is proposing.

Terry Sadler, director of environmental health for the Salt Lake City-County Department of Health, said inspectors visit pools like the one at Cloverland at least once a year. Although the Cloverland fence violated a county law that says such fences should have openings between rails or between the fence and the ground no greater than 4 inches across, Sadler said "somehow it was missed."

"When we notice there's a violation, we do enforce it," he said, adding that inspectors for the Health Department "mainly are looking at water-quality issues."

The city-county department, he said, is responsible for inspecting and issuing permits to more than 800 public swimming pools in the Salt Lake Valley. Those include facilities at motels, hotels, apartment buildings, condominiums, spas and recreation centers.

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Sadler said the proposed Murray ordinance, which would be enforced by the city's planning and zoning department, will only make enforcement easier.

"I don't think the redundancy's going to hurt . . . it'll just bring more attention to the requirement."

Hart said that violations of the county ordinance are usually dealt with by shutting down the pool in question: "If it becomes a health issue, they'll say either drain the pool or fix it."

Under the proposed city ordinance, refusal to comply with fence requirements would be a Class C misdemeanor, according to Hart, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. He said that, strictly speaking, it applies only to new swimming pools, which could not be constructed under the new law in Murray unless city government grants the builder a conditional permit.

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