Tuesday night the Wake Forest Town Board heard about the possibilities for the Holding Park Pool replacement and decided to discuss them further early next month.
It is clear, Mayor Vivian Jones said, “. . . if we want to do it the way we want it done, it will take a year.”
Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said, “If we’re going to do a new pool, we ought to do it right.”
Engineer Mark Hatchel’s PowerPoint presentation dwelt too long on the past, where he has built pools and how pool design has changed before reaching the first relevant point, how pools are built now and what should be included. Current trends, Hatchel said, are for larger facilities with multiple bodies of water. He gave a range of estimates for splash pads to replace neighborhood pools, cost up to $1.5 million; indoor/outdoor recreation center pools with costs from $15 to $30 million; and replacement of old municipal pools with family aquatic centers with costs from $3 to $10 million.
His next slide was about a family aquatic center with features such as water slides, lazy rivers and children’s play features, easy-entry pools up to 6 feet deep, drop slides and diving boards for teens, shade with seating and concessions, and areas for lessons, lap swims and recreation.
The cost to replace the pool as it now is without the multiple pools and features would be $1 to $1.5 million with three to four months of design time and six to nine months for construction.
An indoor pool with a bubble top would be more expensive and have less overall revenue because of staffing and utility costs, Hatchel said. He also said the bubble top would not be compatible with the pool’s setting in a small park.
Holding Park Pool’s site is a great one because of the trees, the historic bath house (the 1940 Community House basement), its central location and adequate parking. The pool shell and piping, Hatchel said, are physically obsolete and the pool is functionally obsolete because it “does not meet current recreational user expectations.”
He recommendation is phased because the town had not planned to spend somewhere between $1 and $3 million for a new pool this year. Phase one would be to design a new-style pool with three bodies of water and build a six-lane lap pool as phase one at a cost of $1.5 million. The next phase would add the children’s pool and the slide pool, also $1.5 million.
He showed a slide of the Greenview Family Aquatic Center in Columbia, S.C., that opened this year with a six-lane 25-yard lap pool, two water slides with a plunge pool, a children’s play pool with water play features that included a very large green frog (its use not defined), a group shade area, and 7,400 square feet of water at a cost of $2.5 million.
Commissioner Jim Thompson said he does not “want to build a 1940 pool” and was amenable to phasing construction, asking if it could be complete by Memorial Day 1917. Maybe in June or by July Fourth, was Hatchel’s answer.
Hatchel also suggested building the new deep pool and the lap pool at the deep end of the current pool and then move east in the next phase for the children’s area near the dressing rooms.
The board’s next meeting is their Nov. 1 work session.
Town staff found problems with the Holding Park Pool in the spring during a pre-opening inspection, problems confirmed by a later assessment by pool professionals. The pool did not open as usual on Memorial Day; instead, the pool was unusable all summer this year. The town commissioners and mayor as well as town staff have been considering how to proceed and have decided to rebuild the pool with the goal of having it open for the 2017 season, which now seems to be a fading dream.
2 Responses
If Commissioner Thompson’s words were stated as written above, then I believe the town is woefully behind having construction completed by “Memorial Day 1917.”
If the cost is over $1 million, the residents need to have input on whether their willing to spend that much money on a new pool.