Facility Upgrade Raises Deep-End Questions
by Jeremy Morrison, Inweekly
The city of Pensacola has plans to reinvest some money — so-called carry forward funds — into its parks and recreation facilities, including a new bathroom and pool house for the Roger Scott pool.
“They need to be fixed,” Mayor D.C. Reeves told Inweekly from his vacation in South America last week. “I mean, we have a city pool that has no bathrooms.”
According to Deputy City Administrator David Forte, the city has about $2.8 million to work with. These are funds that were not used during fiscal year 2022, and so will be carried forward into 2023, where they will appropriated to the same line item in the budget, or reappropriated for other purposes.
“We all understand that park maintenance is one of his top priorities,” Forte said, stressing Mayor Reeves’ focus on maintaining city facilities.
The Roger Scott pool, located near the city’s Vickery Community Center, has been without a bathroom facility for a while now. The previous facility — which housed a bathrooms and an office — was close because it was deemed structurally unsafe.
“This will be our second swim season where we will have to have essentially portable, temporary facilities at the center,” Forte said.
Pensacola City Councilwoman Jennifer Brahier is familiar with these temporary facilities the city has resorted to. She’s not a fan.
“You really can’t just keep bringing in a toilet-truck, if you will, that accommodates that,” Brahier said.
The city councilwoman said she considers dealing with the bathroom situation at Roger Scott to be an “absolute priority,” even though she knows it will be costly and quickly diminish these carry forward funds on the table.
“It could eat up a great deal of it,” Brahier said, nodding toward rising labor and materials costs.
Forte said the city already has plans drawn up for a new pool house facility at Roger Scott — “we have design in hand, essentially shovel ready” — and is awaiting funding for the project. The estimated cost is north of a million, but that might be outdated.
“That’s one where I’ve asked the team to go back to and sharpen their pencils,” Forte said. “It’s right at $1.2 million.”
While a new pool house at Roger Scott may be a priority for Mayor Reeves, the final decision rests with the Pensacola City Council. Council members must approve any funding decisions.
While Brahier thinks that ensuring a proper bathroom facility for Roger Scott’s pool is a top priority, the move also raises other questions for the councilwoman. For instance, how does the city justify upgrading a facility that city residents barely get to use?
Councilwoman Brahier has heard more than a few complaints from her constituents about the difficulty of actually using the city’s pool at Roger Scott.
“Essentially all the time slots were being blocked for YMCA daycare, tennis daycare, etc.,” she explained. “So, it was all being used for daycare, so we were subsidizing the daycares is what we were doing. This was real frustrating to a lot of people.”
A couple of years ago, as a component of developing the city’s new soccer complex off of Langley Avenue, Pensacola entered into a land-and-services swap with the Northeast YMCA, which was previously located on land that now accommodates soccer fields. As part of the deal, the city handed over services to the YMCA, which now operates out of the Vickery as it waits to develop a new complex on adjacent land.
One of the results of this arrangement has been a crunch at the Roger Scott pool. Accordingly, Brahier said, the public is having difficulty finding a public pool to swim in or, perhaps more importantly, secure swim lessons.
“So, we’ve really dropped the ball on being able to provide swimming lessons to residents and to me that’s critical, because we live in a water area, you really want the opportunity for the children to know how to swim,” the councilwoman said.
So, while Brahier welcomes the coming discussion regarding constructing a new Roger Scott pool house, she also thinks such talk opens the door to other topics. For instance, should the city perhaps be contemplating a second-tier swap with the YMCA that would allow the city to shift the organization’s campus elsewhere in the city?
Such a move, the councilwoman suggested, could result in providing the YMCA more space to stretch out in — and construct another pool — and the city getting its pool back at Roger Scott. The move would also avoid other problematic issues, such as the cutting of protected trees in order to develop the YMCA near the Vickery.
“In my opinion, it would be to our advantage to find another location for them,” Brahier said.