The new community pool design is making waves.
The Parks Department presented the plan for a smaller, but more amenity-filled pool to City Council last month. Thursday, a group of involved residents attended the Parks Advisory Board meeting and asked them to reconsider the size.
“We have a little grassroots swim team get started the last few years from St. Mary’s (Catholic School) and the kids use the pool and the multiple lanes there to do competitions,” said Heidi Altman, Head of School at St. Mary’s. “I was wondering if there was a way of the pool remaining and being expanded to keep the lanes it has.”
Altman was joined by lifelong Taylor advocate Pat Helbert, who also spoke about the importance of lap lanes.
The plan Parks Director Tyler Bybee presented to council includes a sloped “beach” entrance into a large water playscape for little kids with a separated splash pad for toddlers, a water slide, a vortex pool, a current channel, water volleyball and basketball set-ups and three lap lanes.
The current pool, with its eight lap lanes, is 9,000 square feet of water surface. The new three-lane pool is 7,500 square feet. The maximum capacity will be 320 people. Bybee said the current aquatic center has never had that many people at once.
The pool is being rebuilt due to major structural flaws causing water loss and filtration failure. The city issued a Certificate of Obligation to fund the pool reconstruction in July of 2022 for $5,260,000 and with accrued interest the budget total for the project is $5,635,880. “A lot of the money is going underground, just like every project we’re doing. You’re either putting in a lot of fill or you’re putting in piers. The idea is to do this on piers because the previous pool was done on fill,” Bybee said.
One of the ways designers tried to maximize the aquatic experience was by reusing existing buildings rather than building new ones. The office, bathhouse and mechanical building will be remodeled instead of being replaced.
While that decision saves money, it also limits the size of the pool, said Philip Cowles of Brannon Engineering and Consulting, the firm that designed the aquatic center.
According to the engineer, at 7,500 square feet the pool code requires only one hot water “cleansing” shower. The team was able to fit a single shower within the existing buildings. Going over that size would require constructing a new bathhouse to accommodate the extra shower.
The facility will have several outdoor rinsing shower heads available, but only one indoor enclosed shower.
The city conducted two community surveys regarding what amenities people wanted in their new pool, and most people said two to four lap lanes was enough, according to the Bybee.
“We feel pretty good about it. People want it bigger but I think you’re getting a better pool and it will feel bigger. Trying to keep those buildings intact and build the pool the community wanted within the budget was what we were trying to accomplish,” he said.
While the parks director understood the desire for a larger pool, he said that the process of procuring more money for the project and redrawing designs could delay the project opening until the 2026 swim season.
“We need to move with the timeline as fast as we can. We need to get that bid out and get construction started at end of summer to get the pool open in 2025.”
