City Council adds money for future swimming pool in northeast Wichita

McAdams Park Pool will stay closed. But the Wichita City Council added $4 million to its long-term spending plan with an eye toward building a new pool somewhere in northeast Wichita several years from now.

For the second time in two weeks, the public hearing on the city’s annual budget was dominated by discussion of the aging pool and what to do about aquatics in a low-income area of the city.

Pool boosters, who acknowledged they didn’t have council support to keep the pool open, said after the meeting that they felt they made some progress in getting the council to recognize the need for swimming opportunities in the northeast part of the city.

“We finally got them to realize the community is behind this,” said Donna Wirth, an organizer in the movement to save the pool.

But she said she has mixed feelings about the council’s actual action.

“It’s kind of a win in acknowledging a need for a northeast pool,” she said. “But it’s not a win in I don’t know it’s going to happen. Whatever was decided today can be reversed a year from now.”

Mayor Jeff Longwell, who has supported closing the current pool, made the motion to add money for a new pool to the 2021 Capital Improvement Plan, the part of the budget dealing with spending for new facilities.

It passed 4-3 with council members Jeff Blubaugh, Bryan Frye and Pete Meitzner voting no.

Longwell’s motion built on earlier comments by council member Janet Miller.

She thanked pool supporters for trying to come up with innovative programs to spur usage as they sought to save the McAdams pool.

But she said those efforts might be wasted on a pool that is outdated, and that a new pool with more modern amenities would be needed to attract enough customers to justify operating it.

Park Director Troy Houtman told the council it would cost the city $30,000 a year to keep McAdams pool open the way it has been operated in recent years, with limited hours and bare-bones maintenance.

It would cost $80,000 to $100,000 to operate it with consistent day and evening hours and the kind of programs people expect from more up-to-date pools, he said.

This story was originally published August 8, 2017 at 1:10 PM with the headline "City Council adds money for future swimming pool in northeast Wichita."