City may not open Christmas Run pool this summer

  • By Sharon Haught
  • March 15, 2010
  • 1050
                        
Council chambers were filled to capacity as members of the community gathered to express their views on the city of Wooster’s pending decision on the temporary closure of Christmas Run swimming pool as part of the effort to bridge a more than $2 million budget shortfall. One by one residents rose to speak about the benefits of keeping the small neighborhood pool open, citing a variety of arguments ranging from the loss of jobs for young people employed as lifeguards to the lack of transportation to the city’s north end for children that live in other areas of the city. Mayor Bob Breneman confirmed that keeping the pool closed this summer is under consideration and that a final decision will be made shortly. “Information came out that we were debating whether or not we might keep Christmas Run pool closed this summer on a temporary basis. That is absolutely true,” said Breneman. “Everything that we do as a city is being debated as far as whether we need to be doing it or we don’t need to be doing it because we are facing a $2 million shortfall going into 2011,” said Breneman. One of the ways of closing that budget gap is to save the approximately $60,000 expense the city incurs annually to keep Christmas Run pool open. “We’re a community of a little over 26,000 people and we have three full-sized pools and a spraypark,” said Breneman, referring to the pools at Christmas Run and Freedlander parks and the natatorium at the high school and the Knights Park spraypark. “If you looked at any place in Ohio we are well blessed with water features that bring enjoyment to people in the summer months. “What the city has to sell is services and one of the services is quality of life things like swimming pools. What we are looking for as an administration is where we can still provide the service to the community but we still…contain our costs,” said Breneman. “Looking at our pools, if we were to close one the service to our community is still there. What we would be reducing is the convenience of that service,” said Breneman, noting that the pool at Freedlander Park is capable of handling all of the programming currently conducted at Christmas Run and is larger both in terms of size and the number of patrons that it serves. The decision to close the pool for the summer likely won’t be the last difficult decision the city faces as it searches for ways to cut expenses. “In business, when we don’t have the revenues we have to cut expenses and some are much more emotional and heartbreaking than others. We’re in that situation as a city,” said Councilman Jon Ansel. “The voters will decide whether we’re going to have to have cuts and we’re going to have to make those tough decisions whether it be Christmas Run pool or other quality of life and safety services issues that we enjoy here in Wooster because the funds aren’t there,” said Ansel. “I think it does come down to do we want to maintain the high caliber of quality of life that Wooster has become accustomed to,” said Councilman Jon Ulbright, noting that one of the jewels of the city is the parks and rec program. “For our size city we go up against cities…10 times our size as far as the quality of those programs,” said Ulbright. “We need to look at either scaling down some of those services for the time being or coming up with some additional revenue.”


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