City Swimming Pool Opens for 43rd Season But It Took a Fight, a Grant and City Workers Turned Excavators to Get Here

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Forty-three years ago this spring the City of Pacific opened its city swimming pool for the first time. During the months leading up to the pool opening the city was in the throes of a dilemma. The board of aldermen was in absolute disagreement. It might not have been the biggest fight leaders had in the city’s history but it was memorable.

As the pool opens Saturday, May 26 for the 2022 season, we take a look back how the community gained this treasure of community service.

In 1978, newly elected mayor Diquie Omer who took office. He wanted to build a city swimming pool during his administration.

“There wasn’t anything in town for kids to do,” Omer recalls. “Getting a pool built was my first project. But I have to say it didn’t go over so well.”

At the mayor’s direction city engineer Marlo Langford drew up plans for a pool that would cost $300,000 and wrote a grant for that amount to the Missouri Clean Water Commission. 

“Marlo planned it out pretty well,” Omer said. “He got the city quite a few grants.”

Some aldermen did not like the idea of a pool and were against applying for a grant to build one. They said $300,000 was entirely too much for the city to spend on a project and besides that a big, fancy swimming pool was too ambitious for a small town like Pacific.

“They wanted everything to stay the way it was,” Omer said. “Their biggest argument was that it would never pay for itself. I argued that we weren’t building it to make money but as a service to the citizens.”

There was also the question of how the city would come up with its matching share of the grant. Then an outgoing business owner and town personality, the late Garland “Ick” Noonan weighed in. When I interviewed his widow Laura Noonan in 2013 she said that summer Ick Noonan was obsessed with getting the pool built.

Noonan owned a parcel of land that adjoined the city park next to Hawthorn Subdivision, which he built. He donated a parcel of the land to the city park system that the city was able to use as its matching funds.

In the end the three aldermen who opposed the pool stood their ground and the pool and grant application were approved by a slim 4-3 vote with the new mayor breaking the tie.

Langford’s grant application was submitted and everything looked great but then a glitch cropped up. Public Works Commissioner Ed Gass recalled that on the morning of the awards, he and Langford who were there for the grant awards, thought Pacific’s application was a sure fire thing. But it turned out that a number of other cities had applied for grants to build swimming pools that summer and when the Commission returned to session after lunch they decided to cut all the grants in half. Pacific received only $149,000 to build its $300,000 swimming pool.

But Omer was determined to go forward with the pool. He, Gass and Langford came up with plan for the city public works department to provide the labor for the construction that the grant would not cover. The city crew of about six men, using Langford’s plans, excavated the hole for the pool, dug trenches and installed water lines to fill the pool and sewer lines to drain it, and dug footings for the fence that was required around the pool.

“The city had to put in the gravel before the concrete was poured,” Gass said. “And we made the fill for the bath house.”

The pool opened for the 1979 swimming season with great fanfare. I have to tell you . . . it could have been 1980 that the pool opened. I was unable to locate records of the grant, construction and grand opening.

I could confirm that Ick Noonan’s efforts and land donation were memorialized when the Noonan family was awarded lifetime passes to the swimming pool. Noonan’s daughter Terry Noonan Rule showed me her pass last week. She recalls taking her children to the pool, “and we all got in free,” she said.

In Omer’s view, the pool is still the best thing the city has ever done.”

“Certainly one of the best,” he said.

Former police chief Matt Mansell, also saw the impact the pool could have on city youth. He sponsored a City Swim Club that would fill the pool with competitive swimmers and garner photo coverage in newspaper sports pages all summer. The large concrete apron around the pool made Pacific the favored location for regional swim meets, which brought huge numbers of visitors to the city.

For the past several years city fathers have debated the life and uses of the pool that vacillates between closing the pool entirely, undergoing major repairs, building a new pool or even building a large aquatic center as some cities have done.

In November 2019 aldermen looked at a Community Park Pool Audit Report created by Westport Pools, which managed the pool that called improvements, including pool railings at the stair entry, new main drain gates, a pool filtration pump, refurbishing the filter sleeves, repainting the pool shell, providing chemical storage, and training system start up.

Looking beyond the 2020 the audit listed $1.2 in major upgrades for that season and a second list of $1.8 million in future renovations and upgrades to add a deck waterslide, basketball goals and volleyball net, a new spray pad with separate filtration, and should replace the entire concrete deck .

A third option would be to demolish and completely replace the pool at a cost of $3.8 million.

This discussion of the future of the pool is still ongoing.

Recently the board of aldermen approved yet another study on the future of the pool that assigned Navigate building Solutions to perform services relating to pre-construction planning for contemplated repairs, renovations or replacement of the municipal pool.