When the City took over operation of the pool in 2011, I was asked to help design how the pool would operate. The system we came up with generated twice as much revenue as other public pools and saved the City a lot of money. I spent over a thousand hours in that effort. I was motivated to do so for two reasons: I wanted to be sure the City’s operation of the pool was a success and I was concerned that, if the pool got too expensive, the City might lose interest in it. I brought those same concerns to the discussions that led to the current pool proposal.
We need to build a pool that meets the needs of the schools as well as the rest of the community. Under the facilities sharing arrangement between the City and the schools, the schools get to use the pool just as the City gets to use the schools’ gyms and sports fields. We are the same taxpayers who would be called on to fund a school pool. It makes no sense to have two pool facilities, one for the schools and one for everyone else, across the street from each other.
It’s time to have one facility that works for everyone—designed so the Piedmont swim team doesn’t have to rent additional space in other communities and spend hours a week commuting to practice; designed so the high school water polo and swim teams don’t have to practice at night or commute to other pools; designed so kids can both play and have swim lessons after school, all with lap swimmers having room to swim and finally being able to swim their laps when they get home from work at night.
It’s not too expensive. The bond measure is about financing, not cost. You can’t bid the project until you have detailed construction drawings and no one would pay to have those drawings done until they knew they had the financing and the project would proceed.
The increased cost estimate from 2016, when the conceptual design was initially approved, simply reflects that it will be built at least six years later, and, in fact, it is in line with what we understand other neighboring communities are doing. When you are arranging for financing, you need to build in room for interest rate fluctuations and other contingencies. Measure UU is simply authorizing bonds.
You don’t have to issue or spend all the bonds that are authorized, but you have to be sure the bond cap is high enough to more than cover the anticipated cost, because you can’t go get more bonds approved in the middle of the project.
The City Council didn’t prioritize the pool over public safety, by putting the pool on the ballot. The fact is our infrastructure is old and needs to be addressed. The pool is on the ballot because there already was a plan to deal with the pool, which had been analyzed, researched, and discussed for years.
The public safety issues just came up. We don’t know enough about them and there isn’t a plan to deal with them yet. It isn’t a question of picking one over the other. If Piedmont is going to be the community you moved here to live in, we have to address them both.
The question is simple: does Piedmont want a pool or not? If we do, it makes no sense to build an inadequate pool. It’s time to have a community pool that finally meets the needs of the whole community.
