TEMECULA -- Ken Dealy knows exactly how long it takes to get to the Claremont Club's pool from his home in Temecula.

"One hour and 5 minutes," he said.

The addition of the 5 minutes -- he didn't just say "about an hour" -- is a telling detail.

Dealy is a swimming dad, the proud father of 11-year-old Kara, a Junior Olympic swimmer who is trying to shave seconds off her butterfly and breaststroke times.

For Dealy, those seconds, and the hours he spends in the car most weekdays, are important units of time.

The Dealys have to drive north to Claremont because there isn't a 50-meter pool in Southwest County, an omission that to Dealy -- and the coaches of some area swim teams -- is glaring.

"We'd love to be swimming here in the valley," Dealy said during a recent phone interview.

Before that can happen, someone -- a private developer, the Temecula City Council, the county of Riverside -- needs to build an Olympic-size swimming pool in Southwest County.

As Dealy is well aware, the state of the economy makes a $50 million investment in a large swimming facility a tough sell, but he's got a persuasive pitch.

"There are hundreds of baseball fields and soccer fields and one public swimming pool," he said, talking about the 25-yard-long pool at the Community Recreation Center on Rancho Vista Road in Temecula.

For casual swimmers and area swim teams, that pool is an important resource, but it's not large enough to accommodate the types of meets that are held in Fullerton and Long Beach.

Southwest County schools open their pools for community use during the summer, but they're only 25 yards long, which is about half the size of the pools used by Olympians such as Michael Phelps.

If there were an Olympic-size pool in Southwest County, Dealy said, it would be used by hundreds of local swimmers.

Huge meets that would attract Olympic stars such as Phelps and Natalie Coughlin could be held there.

Like the sparkling facilities in Orange County, a Temecula pool could produce home-grown swimming stars.

The investment put into the facility, Dealy said, would be recouped by the dollars it would generate.

And for anyone who thinks Dealy is being selfish for pushing for a pool that would benefit his daughter and knock two hours off his commute, Dealy said the timeline of government is long and this sort of project wouldn't be built overnight.

"It's for the community," he said of his efforts. "They're not going to have a pool here for my daughter to train."

One of Dealy's allies, Bryan Davis of the Temecula Swim Club, said he has a good idea of what a local Olympic-size pool and facility would look like.

Davis, a coach who works with more than 300 club swimmers, said he envisions hundreds of area swimmers training year-round at a grade-A facility, where recreational swimmers could splash and play in the cool water and regional meets and water polo matches could be held.

Fees charged to use the pool would help offset the cost of maintenance, a daunting annual bill that has been known to strike fear into the hearts of government budget analysts, and the cost of construction, which would likely run into the tens of millions of dollars.

"The Long Beach pool is booked almost every weekend during the year," he said.

That 50-meter pool, enclosed in a facility called the Belmont Plaza, was built with millions in Long Beach city funds.

It's not the most comely of facilities -- it was once called "a beige hulk squatting on a grimy stretch of Long Beach" -- but it has been used to stage meets that have drawn the likes of Phelps.

Temecula Mayor Maryann Edwards said she isn't opposed to talking to supporters and looking at any plans for such a facility locally.

One of the obstacles, she said, would be the cost of maintaining the pool and the availability of land.

"Maintenance is going to be an issue," she said.

When she served on the school board, Edwards said, members considered building an Olympic-size pool at Chaparral High School but eventually balked at the cost.

That said, Edwards knows the city's pools are "maxed out" and that there might be a need for a new facility.

"I'm always interested in amenities that the whole community would be interested in. But there needs to be communitywide interest in it," she said.

Contact staff writer Aaron Claverie at 951-676-4315, ext. 2624.