The Nichols Park Pool will not open this summer. The Jacksonville City Council came to that quiet consensus Monday night after hearing from engineers from Benton & Associates and the Jacksonville Parks Department.
Benton & Associates Chairman Reggie Benton told the Jacksonville City Council that a major malfunction with the pool’s older pump equipment and some plumbing problems caused testing for the Illinois Department of Public Health to be delayed. While the issues have since been fixed, Benton says there is still a punch list of items that remain for both the contractor and the pool staff to take care of before the pool could open to the public – if the city council wished to open the pool this late in the summer season.
Parks Manager Adam Fletcher says that the biggest problem with opening the pool now, this late in the season is that many of the lifeguards and pool staff who were lined up to work for the pool this year have simply moved on to other opportunities or are no longer available: “At the beginning of the summer, things were looking promising with numbers for the staff. As the summer progressed, people kind of moved on to other opportunities, other venues, and different avenues. Trying to get them back for the last couple of weeks of the season was just going to be tough. We have to be ready for the amount of people that the pool can hold. It’s just unfortunate that we weren’t able to keep the numbers that we had at the beginning of the season. If we could have been able to get it open and tried to find an avenue to figure something out – it was just going to be too tough to get all that lined out to be able to make it work from a safety standpoint and be properly staffed.”
Fletcher says that the pool staff would have primarily been high school and college students who are now in some cases just a few weeks away from preparing to return to school.
Mayor Andy Ezard tried to search for a way to have a temporary opening of the pool for the final two weeks of July and early August because of what he called “optics,” and the displeasure of many people he’s spoken with on the pool not being open this year: “I think folks in the community have known that this has gone on a long time, and if we could do anything to get the pool open just for awhile, I think, optic-wise people would appreciate it. But I understand that we can’t. When safety plays a factor in these decisions, you have to side on the safety aspect. Even though I want it open and everybody else wants it open, sometimes you have to sit back and ask if it’s the right time, and it’s not, unfortunately. We don’t like it. People know my track record with what I feel about Nichols Park and growing up out there, I think they would understand that if I could have done or the City Council could have done more to get it right, we would have. But that wasn’t the case. It was just circumstance and a project that some things failed along the way and of no particular fault of one person – it was just circumstance.”
Parks & Lakes Committee Chair and Ward 2 Alderwoman Lori Oldenettel suggested that the remainder of this year be spent on completing the remaining outstanding renovation items and also looking at ways to spruce up the grounds surrounding the pool to make it ready for next year.
Mayor Ezard says plans are already in the works to have the pool ready to go next year as part of the city’s year-long bicentennial celebration: “We are going to roll it out nicely in the Spring. We are going to turn this negative into a positive. We are going to dress things up more than we anticipated if we were to open it up now and it not being completely finished. It’s going to be completely right in the Spring, and we look forward to celebrating that with a ribbon cutting.”
Benton reminded the city council that if something were to malfunction next Spring within the first few weeks of opening, the project is bonded and the contractor would be required to return to fix any outstanding issues or problems should they pop up once the public has returned to the pool.