Indoor pool facility is topic of focus group
CHRIS ROUSH/ DAILY FORUM
Maryville Parks and Recreation Director Rod Auxier discusses the feasibility and possibility of an indoor aquatic center in Maryville. Several members of the Maryville community met at the Maryville Community Center Monday night.
The only indoor aquatic center in Maryville shut down three years ago.
Now members of the Maryville community have started to discuss ways of possibly bringing an indoor facility back to town.
A group of more than 25 Maryville community members met Monday night at the Maryville Community Center to discuss the possibility of creating a new indoor aquatic center.
“In my own case, I had been swimming on campus and I kind of got back into swimming later in my career at Northwest,” spokesman Ray Courter said. “I had been swimming for a few years and when I retired, I had a little bit more time to swim and I made relationships with people that enjoyed swimming. Those relationships carried over to the announcement of the Robert P. Foster Aquatic Center.”
After the aquatic center shut down in 2012, there were petitions created to keep the center open. According to comments made by Northwest professor emeritus Dave Easterla during Monday night’s forum, students were able to come up with 500 signatures of individuals wanting to keep the center open.
Nonetheless, the center was shut down, but Courter said it didn’t take long for community members to start discussing possibilities for a new center.
“It was probably a year after the center closed down that some of us would bump into each other and have conversations about regretting it had closed, but realizing as a pool it had probably outlived it’s usefulness,” Courter said. “It was probably better suited to become what it is now — a larger rec center.”
Courter understood the need for a larger recreational center, the Robert and Virginia Foster Fitness Center, which is currently under construction and is expected to open in the fall of this year. However, Courter believes the closing of the indoor aquatic center left a void in the community.
Along with Courter and Easterla, Maryville Parks and Recreation Director Rod Auxier spoke during the open forum Monday night. Auxier said the department had looked at several communities that had built aquatic centers to get an idea of the cost.
“The main concern for Maryville Parks and Recreation of an indoor center is the cost,” Auxier said. “The construction of one is quite expensive, but the biggest thing is the annual operation. You have to subsidize a pool for $200,000 to $500,000 a year, that is over a third of our budget and it’s not feasible for us. That is why in this group discussion we have, I still think it needs to be a partnership and I always have. It is going to take a group to make this a reality in my opinion.”
According to Auxier, each year without including the improvements to the outdoor pool at Beal Park, it cost $20,000 to $25,000 in subsidies for the 10 or 11 weeks the pool is open.
During the forum, individuals from around the community discussed the positives of creating a new indoor aquatic center, including using it as a recruiting tool, helping out the youth and rehabilitation.
“It’s a quality of life thing,” Auxier said. “People grow older and want kids to swim, but people grow older and swimming and water aerobics is huge. They don’t like it as much outdoors, but we get big numbers. But our indoor dry land, we used to have 15 to 20, but now we have 30 to 50 people that come on a regular basis for land exercise. They want water exercises and that’s another reason why an indoor pool would be very desirable.”
Auxier and Courter discussed the need for community support as well as local partnerships in order to make this idea a long-term goal. Courter believes that the University should also be a part of the process.
“The University is part of the community and I suspect that they will be very interested in finding a way to partner,” Courter said. “I think they will find a way to work with whoever the other partners could be. It could be the city, the hospital and the local industries, Kawasaki perhaps. I’m sure all of this will come, but it will come in time.”
At the end of the forum, several individuals agreed that more conversations needed to take place and that a possible feasibility survey could be done in the future.
