Prop 1 is fatally flawed. If you vote yes, you are giving our officials free rein to raise your taxes by many thousands of dollars over 20 years in order to build the pet project of the high school swim team.
Our perfectly adequate pool is 48 years old, but half the city's housing stock is older still. When your house needs a roof and a furnace, you install a new roof and furnace. You don't condemn the whole structure. Many people have asserted in this blog that there's no point renovating the pool, but nobody is giving concrete answers about why we cannot. Be skeptical. Demand answers.
The new competition pool would have the same length as the existing competition pool, but add two lanes. Nothing in the design references a sauna or hot tub, both of which would benefit older fitness seekers. Compare to Lynnwood, where in addition to the multiple pools and lazy river, they included a sauna, not one but two hot tubs, and two waterslides. If we're going to make an enormous investment, we should include amenities that benefit everyone, not just interest groups.
Claims that a new facility would be significantly more efficient than the current pool fall flat when one asks for evidence. Heating any pool is energetically expensive. With the approximately 70% increase in water surface area per the draft plan, you can count on it that the city's gas bill will only go up.
City officials openly debated whether to tack on $15M of park improvements in order to make this measure more palatable to voters. Make no mistake: this measure IS about the pool, despite people's claims that it is not.
They need to make a better case to earn your vote. Vote No and send it back for rework.
Dan Adams
Shoreline
Additionally, the Lynnwood Rec Center cost $24.5M in 2011 dollars, while the Snohomish Aquatic Center cost $22.2M in 2014 dollars.
ReplyDeleteAllowing a few percent for inflation is one thing, but why the heck are we budgeting an eye-popping $88M for the ShARCC? This is especially concerning since Lynnwood and Snohomish are basically municipal indoor water parks, while the ShARCC promises to be a fairly ho hum pool.
Since there is no place to comment on Mayor Winstead's Op-Ed, I'll post my question here.
ReplyDeleteMayor, you say that it's difficult or impossible to find parts to service the existing pool. If you're talking about servicing the boiler, that makes sense.
But what I and others find disingenuous about that argument is that everyone across the board agrees that the boiler should be replaced with the most efficient unit possible, to save on operating expenses. If plumbers are in the guts of the maintenance room working with torches to put a new unit in, how could there be a parts availability/compatibility problem?
Fundamentally, the measure you crafted seeks to spend tens of millions of dollars of city taxes to just pick up a pool and move it. We're not getting enough new stuff to justify the eyewatering cost. We need to either go big as Lynnwood did, or go frugal by fixing what we have. Prop 1 is a half measure that manages to both be too expensive and underambitious.