Asheville – Spring is already here in WNC, with daffodils and cherry trees blooming, so summer is not far away. Summer invokes thoughts of baseball, lemonade, and swimming pools, but there will be no swimming pool this summer for the people in West Asheville. The city, along with parks and recreation, has decided that the 90-year-old Malvern Hills pool will not reopen. The pool was closed with no warning to the community due to the need for extensive repairs. The problem is, the Asheville city council has known about these needed repairs since an assessment was done in 2016.
Community Takes Immediate Action
After residents got 1400 signatures on a petition to reopen the pool, Mayor Ester Manheimer, Parks and Recreation Director D. Tyrell McGirt, and other members of city council set up a casual public meeting with signs on easels to explain the closing. However, the people in attendance weren’t impressed and wanted answers. When they got angry, it turned the meeting into a contentious Q&A session. The people present asked if the pool would ever reopen or be replaced and why the city waited so long after the study—8 year—to make this decision.
Built in the 1930s, the 2016 assessment recommended that the pool be replaced or demolished. Necessary repairs would cost about $400,000 and would only be a band-aid on the problem. The cost to rebuild the pool would be more than $1.5 million. But to be clear, the pool isn’t really the problem; it’s yet another symptom of poor money management by our elected officials.
Out Of Touch Politicians
In front of nearly 100 people, including many children who have gone to this pool their entire lives and carried signs saying “Save Our Pool,” Kim Roney came forward and said, “We’re all having to pay higher taxes. We can all see what the city budget is. We can all see that we’re not operating under a deficit. We have $400,000.00. We have $1.5 million, but how does that get carved out to go toward the pool?” This was not a good thing to say to a group of West Ashevillians who have felt like the red-headed stepchild for years. As one man put it, “the money from the city does not make it across the bridge.”
As the crowd reacted angrily to Roney’s statement, McGirt stepped in and spoke of the budget challenges in maintaining all of the parks and recreation facilities, adding: “I would not recommend making these repairs; I would recommend just rebuilding the pool. That’s not going to happen this summer.”
Manheimer, in her typical reply, used the opportunity to ask for more tax dollars, “We just need to put together the money, and it’s so helpful that you’re all here to help the city understand that this has to be a priority, and we’ve got to make this happen for our community. So I’m taking your yes vote on a bond package for parks and rec so that D. Tyrell has the money to rebuild this pool and continue to invest in our parks and rec facilities like all the parks he’s been able to manage to rebuild.” This statement gets us to the real heart of the problem because there was already a $17 million bond referendum passed in 2016 for parks and rec. There was also a bond referendum passed in the last election for $70 million for public greenways, blueways, and farmland. Do we really need more bond referendums, increasing our taxes?
Skewed Priorities and Poor Money Management
The city council has spent more money on studies by out-of-town consultants, reparations, homelessness, and bike lanes than it would have cost to repair the pool in 2016. How did that work out? Not very well; the homelessness problem is worse; the reparations committee can’t decide how they want to allocate the funds and now wants them in cash, which is not allowed according to the rules; and the bike lanes are empty of bicycles while causing traffic issues and costing local merchants.
The best example of the council’s cavalier attitude toward spending was a comment by Councilperson Sage Turner during the decision to extend the bike lanes, when Turner stated, “As someone who learned in planning school the importance of multi-modes, the importance of future cities, the importance of safe ways of access, I feel compelled to at least try this.” Turner continued, “If it doesn’t go well, we can fix it.” The cost to “fix it” was estimated at $150,000.
There are growing signs that the people of Asheville are getting frustrated about everyone else coming first, while their needs are neglected.