The Winamac Park Board continues to explore the expected maintenance costs for a rebuilt swimming pool. Last week, board member and town manager Brad Zellers presented a list of eight cities and towns around the state and what they spend each year on their pools. Of those, only two broke even, with pool admissions and concession sales.
The Town of Winamac has $40,000 budgeted annually for pool maintenance. Three of the communities on the list approached that amount or exceeded it. However, Zellers pointed out those figures depend on the size of the pool, how old it is, and whether utility costs are included in the budget. He added that Winamac’s pool would be brand new, significantly smaller, and the town would cover utility costs.
Winamac Town Council member Judy Heater has been leading the pool rebuilding effort. She told board members that her team has planned for maintenance costs and continues gathering donations to help cover future expenses. “We are going to keep fundraising,” she said. “We have one planned for the spring, and we’ll continue to do that for the foreseeable future, as far as we’re concerned. We did ask if the community supported it. They did. I mean, they showed that, wholeheartedly. But we did try to consider all of these points and make sure that we weren’t diving into something that we could not afford because that was uppermost in our mind. We wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen.”
While the town budgets $40,000 for pool maintenance, Clerk-Treasurer Melanie Berger says that doesn’t guarantee that money will actually be there when it’s needed. “Tax monies change yearly,” she said. “So the town can’t even say, ‘Well, we know we’re going to get x amount of dollars in to cover this,’ because I don’t just have a Parks and Recreation to cover, but you have fire, you have police. There’s a lot more that go into a general fund than just these few things.”
Town Attorney Justin Schramm pointed out the town council could implement a tax specifically for parks and recreation. “The taxable property in the town comes to 40-, 45-million dollars, and if you consider one-and- two-thirds cents on that, it raises an extra 10-, 15-, 20-thousand dollars, maybe, per tax that you administer,” he said. “You can, and that’s the town council who levies the tax since you don’t have separate taxing authority, but since you are a special taxing district, you can levy a tax for the purposes of running the Board of Parks and Recreation, which could then be allocated for use by the pool, or you can levy a tax for a Cumulative Capital Development Fund.”
While Park Board President Courtney Poor says it’s important the board knows its options should the need arise, he’s hopeful that residents’ passion for their local parks will make a new tax unnecessary. “I really believe it’s because of memories,” he said. “It’s memories that they have – people that are passionate about this because they have good memories. So what I’m saying is that when someone’s passionate about something, that makes it a lot easier to go with hat in hand and say, we need a little sumpin’ sumpin’.”
During last week’s meeting, Poor also said that the Community Foundation of Pulaski County had presented the park board with a check for an additional $1,920 for the pool rebuilding project.
