Are You Watching This?

By Pauline Masson –

My late friend Bob Bailin had a memorable reaction to troubling behavior in others. Rather than take them on directly, he looked elsewhere for solace.

When he saw people – and especially friends –  acting out of line, he would tilt his head back, look up to Heaven, and say in his best “My Goodness!” voice, “Are You Watching This!”

That came back to me like a nursery rhyme jingle that keeps playing over and over in your head last week when I watched the Nov. 15 special board of aldermen (BOA) meeting. I had to wonder who was watching when aldermen voted unanimously to apply for a $879,500 matching grant to upgrade the pool house. Not the swimming pool, mind you, but the pool house.

It’s actually a 50-50 matching grant with the city receiving $439,750 and having to match the grant with $439,750 of taxpayer funds.

Mayor Heather Filley raised some concerns that put the grant application in perspective. She worried that in recent seasons the city has had a financial challenge to keep the pool open and operating, and building a new pool house to serve an aging swimming pool might be an error in timing.

“The concern I have with that –  knowing the timing – we know that we are going to have to put funds into the pool sructure itself. We know we will have to sand blast it so there will be that cost that we will have to incur for this year coming up as well as what may happen in 2026 and 2027.”

“My concern is, not knowing that part, would it be better to be looking at updating the pool itself now and then the pool house later versus the pool house first and then the pool later?” she said.

Acting Board President Scott Lesh prepared the grant application. He argued that now was the right time to apply for funds for a pool house. 

He said the City would not know for a year whether or not the grant had been approved and work on the pool house would be two years out.

 “And if we continue to save money for the pool we’re not going to be in a position where we can’t do anything to the pool deck, that being a bigger project with a $1.5 million estimate on that,” he said “That’s why it just makes sense if we apply for that one (the pool house) now we might run into a situation where we’re dipping into contingency funds.”

“If we do this one first so we don’t miss a grant cycle and then we can move into this one (the swimming pool structure) next.

Mr. Lesh said he turned to Water’s Edge Pools, an Ohio based swimming pool construction firm and asked them if it would be a problem to build a pool house first and then upgrade the swimming pool. This is the firm that prepared a plan to build a new, enlarged $5 million swimming pool and pool house.

“They (Water’s Edge Pools) said no – largely you don’t want to do the pool deck before you do additions but as far as the pool house and you could do it first and do the pool second,” Mr. Lesh said.

In his defense, Mr. Lesh was serious that he trusted Water’s Edge Pools spokesmen to guide him in future plans for the city pool and pool house. But it should be noted that a multi-million dollar swimming pool contractor may not be the best source of advice on planning city budgets or spending taxpayer money.

Without a discussion the six aldermen voted unanimously to approve the grant application and direct the mayor to sign it and submit it.

I have to tell you . . . this post is intended as a cautionary tale.

An $879,500 grant to construct a pool house next to an aging and cantankerous swimming pool is a far cry from the $100,000 grant – with a $20,000 city match – the City was awarded to put an ice cream parlor in the Red Cedar Visitor Center/Museum. When Aldermen decided to abandon the ice cream parlor and notified the granting agency that the City would not be needing the $80,000, tempers flared all over the city.

Why would we turn down free money? antagonists asked.

So here is the question. How are citizens and taxpayers going to react if we are awarded this grant and build a new pool house only to find that we don’t have enough money in the budget to upgrade the pool structure or to make enough repairs to keep it open – let alone build a new pool.

Even if we put a $5 million bond issue on the ballot and ask citizens to pay for a new pool in their real estates taxes, there is no guarantee that voters would approve it.

The $879,500 grant application is already a done deal. The application has been approved, (unanimously), signed and mailed. So all we can do now is cross our fingers that – in a year or so if we learn that the grant is approved – the city fathers will find a way to keep the water flowing and contained in the pool so patrons can swim.

I hope I’m worrying for no reason. I hope we end up with a spiffy new handicapped accessible pool house and a swimming pool that can last several seasons.

But citizens should not be caught off guard if the pool house before the pool turns out to make the horse before the cart proverb look like a truism from Poor Richard’s Almanac.

Mayor Filley said she would have preferred for aldermen to approve a grant to repair the swimming pool and once the pool was in condition to last several years, apply for a grant to upgrade the pool house.

“Doing it this way is definitely putting the cart before the horse,” she said. “They should have applied for a grant to upgrade the swimming pool and made application for a grant for a pool house number two.”

She added, “I can only imagine how much it will cost us to upgrade the pool in 2025, let alone in 2026 and 2027,” she said. “We can’t start construction on a pool house for two years. We don’t even know what it will cost to maintian the pool and open it for 2025.”

In the two-term cycles of city politics many things are possible. There may be new people on the board of aldermen when the grant – if awarded – makes its way into the city budget. So this may all work out in taxpayer’s favor.

But I’d be remiss if I failed to alert readers of the possibility that the City could end up with a $879,500 pool house and an empty swimming pool.

All this is to say that if citizens pay attention to what the city fathers do at their public meetings they have a better shot at influencing the outcome. So keep watching.