Pool plans progressing

Last November, after learning about serious problems at the Holding Park Pool and discussing three alternatives for its replacement, the Wake Forest commissioners voted for a $25-million plan that will include many new features but keep the pool closed until the spring of 2018.

Since November Parks, Recreation & Cultural Resources Director Ruben Wall, his staff and the design consultant firm, Kimley Horn, have collected data and worked on preparing the construction documents. “Geo-tech sampling and survey work have been completed. On-site meeting with consultant has been scheduled for March 15,” Wall said in an email this week.

The next steps will be to advertise for bids in April, receive the bids and award the construction contract in May with construction scheduled to begin in June and be completed in December. The new pool will open in May for the summer season.

The new pool area will include a lap pool, a slide plunge/lesson pool with open and enclosed sides, a children’s multi-use pool with play features and a shaded pavilion, all on the same site as the existing pool. The additional features were one of the three options the town board chose. In the first option, construction and some deconstruction would take place over two years, allowing for a 2017 swim season in the pool. The price tag was $2.8 million. The third plan was to reconstruct the existing pool with improved lighting, a new filtration building and a shaded pavilion for $2.1 million.

In November, the town board had already approved repairs at the pool and the town had entered into an agreement with BB&T for a $740,000. Town Manager Kip Padgett told the board in November BB&T had agreed to add $2.5 million to that 10-year loan, which has a good rate of 2.5 percent. The town has a policy of borrowing less than $10 million in any fiscal year. Other expenditures for fiscal 2017-2018 include replacing town cars and motorized equipment and $1.6 million to repair/rehabilitate several town streets, build the missing links in some street and repair curbs in the South Forest Business Park.

In the draft update to the Capital Improvements Program, the cost totals $2.9 million including the $242,500 the town has already spent on the project. There will be a public hearing about the CIP at the town board’s business meeting on Tuesday, March 21.

Where will children and adults who take swimming lessons or swim daily laps go during this summer? Wall said in November the town will do it all it can to arrange access to a pool or pools. “We’re still working on it,” he said this week. “We have met with the YMCA and have other meetings planned with some HOA management companies. We will put something out as soon as we have some more information.”

The original pool and the Wake Forest Community House were built in 1942 by local men, some of them laid off from the Royal Cotton Mill, with financing by the federal Works Progress Administration paying $67,117 and the town paying $12,800 after town voters approved a bond issue. It had attractive stone work in several places.

By 1978 the pool was showing its age so the town rebuilt it, enlarging it to Olympic size and tearing out most of the stone work to accommodate more modern diving boards and other changes.