It's probably not recirculated water, just continual replenishment.

That, and the whole exercise is to funnel money to some cronies.

This isn't your back yard pool, this is a huge body of water that attracts lots of wildlife and having heavy chlorine isn't exact great for said wildlife. Dead animals in and around this massive reflecting pool isn't exactly what you'd want.

I might be mistaken, but I don't think the reflecting pool is chlorinated. It pulls in and dumps out water to the local natural waterways. They're supposed to be using something else (UVC?) to control tiny organisms like algae.

As others have pointed out it is not. The other part that makes this even worse is the paint used heats the water even more than before which expedites the algea growth. The water level is low which doesnt help either, but thats always been a known problem. It's just funny that if you were going to fix the pool you would think the money invested would have also been used to fix the original problems, but nope not even an attempt and here we are, tens of millions spent on absolutely nothing.

I think the water isn’t circulated because the water movement requires to keep the chlorine distributed disturbs it enough that there’s no “reflecting” effect.

As a solemn body of water, the idea is beautiful. As a practical application, it’s a fucking stupid idea.

2009 The pool's water supply system was updated to eliminate stagnant water by circulating water from the Tidal Basin; the pool was formerly filled using potable water from the city.