I had a friend ask about the new pool. Against my better judgment, I decided to try to get the facts straight, about a proposed Town of Vienna municipal pool and weight room.
I didn’t get very far. But if you read nothing else, pause to consider the two maps below.
Edit 10/24/2024: What a sheep I am sometimes. I fell right into this one. Just copyin’ the slides.
The price tag above excludes the purchase price for the property (the land), and the cost of demolition of the then-existing structures. The issue at hand is the amount the Town now needs to borrow, but if you’re reckoning the total cost, you need to add in the cost of the land and prep, call it another $6M.
Full disclosure: My family belongs to one of the private membership pools in Vienna. We also use the Fairfax County rec centers, which come with pools. Neither of one influences my thinking, but both give me some perspective, I think.
Start with the latest, track it back.
The agenda for the 10/7/2024 Town Council work session (.pdf), component on the Capital Budget, is the most recent place I can find a swimming pool mentioned. The presentation mentions that Town Council “supported” the idea of using the former Baptist Church property as a 30,000 square foot pool-and-gym. That document refers to “Full Project concept and description attached to Sept 30 Work Session.”
The Town’s consultant’s materials can be found on this page, for the Town’s 9/30/2024 work session. I have no idea what Town Council said, because there’s no published minutes to that meeting, and I don’t feel like taking the time and hassle trying to make it through a video recording of it. (But the link for that is on that page.)
What I got, I got from reading that consultant’s report.
Bottom line
There’s no need to guess how many people are likely to use the new Town of Vienna Pool.
Just ask them. Take a random sample of families in the proposed market area, mail them a survey invite, ask them if they’re interested in using the proposed pool and gym at the proposed fee levels, and see what response you get.
Why does this point even come up? See maps immediately below. Plus discussion of “free”, following that. In response to open-ended questions, did respondents really hear “free pool use”? If so, that’s not a valid proxy for $1K/year family membership pool use.
My contention is that the Town really doesn’t have a realistic idea of the likely number of users. The Consultant didn’t factor in the level of market saturation for indoor (gym-attached) public pools in this area, at the proposed fee level. And the preponderance of answers on the Town’s open-ended inquiry likely does not capture the demand for $1K/year family memberships to a municipal indoor pool/gym complex. (As opposed to “wouldn’t a pool be nice”.)
Based on my years hanging out with real business people, if you can cheaply reduce the uncertainty around a major investment, you should feel burdened to do so. So, say that you’re about to spend $25M of the taxpayers’ money. And raise taxes, un-forced, to cover the finance charges for that. You’re also committing to making up any operating shortfall for this new facility, if one arises, more-or-less forever.
Have you even (e.g.) asked Herndon to come over and give you some comments, since Herndon already runs one of these gym/pool complexes? How about Fairfax County Parks and Rec. I’d sure want to hear from those folks, in person, before proceeding.
But mostly, in the context of spending $25 million and up, a little extra money spent now, on a quick, even-handed market survey, would reduce some of the uncertainty around how well the annual memberships are likely to sell. And thus both the demand for it, and the likely operating deficit that the Town will incur annually going forward.
Two immediate punchlines from perusing the consultant’s report.
Thing 1: The consultant’s projection of demand for a pool seems to be done in a vacuum.
With enough digging, you can find the consultant’s report for this proposed pool and gym (available from the Town’s Granicus page for the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session, downloadable as a .pdf).
Grind through it, and you find that the consultants do a projection of the likely demand for this municipal pool/gym. I’ll skip the details.
The point is, that estimate of likely demand isn’t hard data. It’s a generic projection of likely demand or typical demand, based on … who knows what. Given the number, demographics and disposable income of the nearby population, the consultant came up with an estimate that umty many people are likely to shell out for $1K/year Vienna Pool membership, or spend $X for a day pass, or $Y a month, or some such..
Below is the consultant’s market areas (“service areas”) map. It shows the location of the population on which the projected use of the proposed Vienna Pool is based:
Let me annotate that, just with Fairfax County rec centers.
If you don’t immediately see my point, it’s that if you’re going to be in competition with the County rec centers, and if travel time is a big determinant of which facility you use, then the “natural” market area for a Vienna Municipal Pool might look more like this:
My point being, I guess, that if the criterion for the current County Rec center user base is primarily “I’m not going to go out of my way to use the Town of Vienna facility”, then from the outset, you’re looking at a smaller population from which to draw your customer base for the Vienna Pool.
Or something along those lines.
The market space (and market area) look a bit more crowded than you might think, based solely on the consultant’s analysis. (And, granted, this isn’t a swipe at the consultant. Likely, this sort of quick pro-forma is what they budgeted to do. Level of specificity might even have been spelled out in the contract.)
You are always welcome to wade through the methodology section yourself. This is a link to a Town of Vienna page on Granicus, and most of what I refer to comes from the .pdf document labeled Appendix C. I’ve worked through it twice now, and didn’t notice any reference to the specific locations of competing rec centers. To me, this appears to be a projection of total users, of an otherwise-unserved market, based on the wealth/age mix of the nearby population, and, presumably, the fee structure imposed.
Those County-run rec centers all have pools, weights, and so on. Those all sell gym memberships. In fact, one membership gets you access to all three (and more) of them. (Three’s plenty.) And, relevant, I think, the Oakmont rec center is arguably the nicest gym my wife and I have ever used.
My point being that Fairfax County has already set a relatively high bar, in this area, for this exact product (government owned and run pool/gym).
This map doesn’t include relevant private entities (The Reston YMCA would fill in the otherwise blank northwest corner, but off the map, I think. So that, along with nearby membership-only outdoor pools, the Country Club in town, and so on. Not clear that the market segments for all of those would overlap strongly with the market for $1K/year family memberships on the TOV Pool. Best not to muddy the map with them.
This, coupled with a proposed family membership price, for the Vienna Pool, somewhere around the same $1K/year the County charges tells me that …
I would take user projections based on the first map with a grain of salt. Even if you restrict yourself to government-run gyms, with pools and weight rooms, there are several very nice ones already located nearby. These are the County rec centers. Fairfax seems to charge about what the consultant suggested be charged for this pool, for a family membership.
Would my wife and I give up County Rec membership to join Vienna? Probably not, if it were up to me, as I don’t fancy meeting people I know in the weight room. But you never know.
Thing 2: The Town’s emphasis on “Pool” being the most popular of open-ended responses.
I hate to be this guy, but you need to ask that question again, if you plan to make anything of it.
Your realistic options for use of this land might look like this:
- Couple of soccer-ish fields, for free.
- Pool/gym, $1K/family/year.
I would view any open-ended question as equivalent to skipping the phrase in red. As we daydream about how nice a pool would be, few of us begin by daydreaming about the $1K charge on our credit card.
If you forget to say the phrase in red, you’ll likely get a different answer, than if you say that.
This is not uncommon in survey work. For years, as an expert on Medicare end-of-life care, I was floored by the fraction of survey respondents who preferred to die at home (rather than in a hospital or similar), and how few actually managed that. Eventually, somebody told me the practical answer, which is that they asked the wrong question on the survey. The real-world question, if you are lucky enough to be able to understand it at the time, is, would you like to die right now, or go to the hospital. Faced with the actual question, many more opt for “hospital”, than choose home.
So just ask them.
Just measure it. Just do anything other than seat-of-the-pants decisionmaking. I’ve pressed this point, to no avail, before, on other issues, with the Town. So I doubt I’ll get traction. But I feel like it needs to be said.
It’s not that hard to get some better guess as to what the demand for a $1K per year Town of Vienna Pool membership would be.
You don’t have to rely on some generic methodology, based on a projection from demographics, that does not account for (e.g.) competition already in your market area.
Just do a decent survey. It should not be hard to hire a firm wise in the ways of lightweight surveys, and get this done. A couple-thousand letters, a couple-hundred responses, and you’d have some better basis for judging demand for a pool. And if you did it right, you’d have a better basis for understanding demand for a pool, relative to demand for (e.g.) a couple of general-use ballfields.
Barring that, you could at least put a pull-out postcard card in the Vienna Voice, asking the realistic question, and have a staff member tally up the responses. With a mass mailing like that, you’re always at risk for somebody not playing by the rules, and attempting to influence the results. And you can be dumb enough to slant your own question to bias your results. But absent that, even that low-tech method provides you with more information than you have currently.
The Town already participates on some large-scale surveys, showing how the Town is doing. Fielding this non-binding survey of Town citizens is just business-as-usual.
The other “them” that should be questioned is other local governments. Herndon has a facility like this. Fairfax County does, already mentioned. Not sure about Fairfax City or Falls Church.
Surely you’d want their insight on what you’re planning to do, and why. Face-to-face, in front of Town Council, if possible. A panel of folks who’ve had experience with it, locally.
The moolah to cover the annual operating costs.
That said, there don’t seem to be enough pools to go around. I know that the place we have belonged to for decades has a several-year waiting list.
But, that’s for a membership in a fun pool. That’s a summer-outdoors-with-the-kids kind of pool. With barbecue grills and pool noodles and such.
What you get with a gym is a different experience entirely. The Town may be aiming for a fun pool, but if so, that’s quite different from what the County Rec Center indoor gym-attached pools are. With the indoor pools at the rec centers, you get a somber, geezers-swimming-laps kind of pool. You get an exercise-centric pool. Not a whole lot of giggling and splashing at my local Fairfax Rec Center pool. But the Town of Vienna indoor pool might manage to pull that off. I don’t know.
I’m not saying this latest indoor pool proposal is a bad idea. At all. It all depends on the demand for it, and the cost, and so on.
So I thought I’d clip a few bits out of the consultant’s report, to ballpark the cost figures.
But it’s tough to ballpark anything if you have no notion of what it ought to cost to run one of these things.
What does it cost Fairfax County, annually, to operate its Rec Centers?
Searching Fairfax County’s website, they say that FxCO operates nine rec centers, with annual total operating budget of about $25M. Or roughly $2.8M/rec center/year, for the operating budget. FWIW, 105 FTEs. Eyeballing some stats on pool size and weight room size, I’m guessing the average size of these is in the 100K square foot range. Or about three times the size of the proposed 30K square foot facility for Vienna.
I’d expect only modest economies of scale w/r/t/ building size, so I’m guessing an operating cost of … $1.5M per year.
For the Vienna Pool, the consultant seems to expect the following: About $2.5M year operating cost, $1.7M a year operating revenues, but see discussion of demand projections above. (Throughout, I think we’re focused on A+F 2, whatever that may be. Pool and weight room, plus.)
Based on the suggested per-day pricing, that’s about 20,000 drop-in (single-day) users annually, and maybe 1500 annual subscriptions at (say) $660 per subscription. (That’s all my guesswork, but unless I slipped a decimal point I think that’s close.)
One obvious comment on the proposed pricing is that these membership rates appear to be no clear discount relative to Fairfax County’s rates for Rec center use. Given that we have three of those within driving distance of Vienna, of the people that would be interest in a family membership to a public rec center with weight room and pool, how many of those already have FxCo memberships?
Conclusion.
I try not to eat in Town of Vienna restaurants. Well, these days, I try not to eat in restaurants, period. Of which, Town of Vienna restaurants are a subset.
The $25M capital cost estimate? Apparently the Town can swing that merely by raising the meals tax. So I’ve got no apparent skin in this game. There’s the issue of what else might be crowded-out by doing that. But, at present, the idea is that another whopping bond issue in a couple of years will cover it. But that, on top of the whopping bond issue that (e.g.) paid for triple-sizing the police station will require raising the meals tax, to cover all that interest and principal repayment.
The operating, year-to-year shortfall is another matter entirely. Meals-tax money can’t be used to cover the operating deficit, if for no other reason than that the Town has pledged the money from the meals tax to cover bond interest and repayment.
Unless I misread the documents, the plan was to expect to see something like a Edit: $0.8M $0.5M annual operating deficit. But I have the bad feeling that’s somehow based on the consultant’s estimate of likely demand. Which is backed up by a projection of demand that doesn’t account for local competition in this market segment, as illustrated above. And the Town seems to be relying on the results of its own non-quantitative open-ended survey, as if it showed high demand for $1K/year family pool memberships.
But mostly, my understanding of how these things work is that an ongoing deficit is to be expected. The parks (and by extension, rec centers) are a subsidized quasi-public good, like bus service. There may be some aspirational break-even goal, but … something something something … it’s … OK … if the user fees don’t cover the annual operating cost.
It hurt to write that last clause. Setting the annual fees below annual operating cost is too close to setting price below marginal cost. It’s one of those things that always makes economists squirm, at least a little bit. Even if you can finagle some plausible justification for doing it.
So it’s not merely that we might be on the hook for later years of losses, it’s that it’s considered reasonable and normal for such losses, within reason, to occur. Permanently, I mean, more or less. Kinda like the local parks being free, or some such? There’s a feeling that part of the cost should be paid by local tax dollars, not by user fees.
I recall (or misrecall) a time when Fairfax County strove to have Rec Center user fees cover 100% of operating costs. I.e., the County called for no operating loss on County Rec Centers. Edit: I’m pretty sure they backed off that at some point, and I read that Rec Center revenues cover 66% of costs at this point. But I cannot provide a proper cite for that. The Fairfax County Park Authority receives about a third of its funding from general revenues (Source: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/budget-fees). But at present, for the Rec Centers, the golf courses, and such, Fairfax still seems to require that user fees cover the full operating costs. (It’s hard to tell, due to the oddly clever ways in which they qualify just exactly which costs are covered by those fees.) At present, they note that the resulting high fees discourage use by the poor, and so are considering moving to some sort of sliding-scale fee model, with general tax revenues subsidizing enrollment costs for lower-income citizens (https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/equity-study).
Surely that annual operating loss on Fairfax County rec centers is viewed as unfortunate, but it’s not seen as a reason to shut those down, or as a reason to raise fees precipitately (if at all).
It is the way it is. Exercise is good. We make a little loss? Taxpayers can eat it.
The demand might for those Vienna Municipal Pool services might be there, at a price that fully covers operating costs. Or it might not.
Seems a pity not to ask people some fairly straightforward questions about willingness to pay, at realistic prices, first, before you build it. Because once you build it, effectively, it’s yours to maintain forever.
One final thought: Seems like, in a mature marketplace (the local market for government-run pool/weighs/etc. rec centers), product differentiation might be the key to success. As I said, my impression of the County rec center pools is that they are primarily exercise-centric facilities. (Might just be the time of day that I exercise, but the pool area … is always quiet.) I see the Town already has a slide as part of the pool design, and the consultant uses a wording to suggest that suggests it’s supposed to be a fun pool, not an exercise pool.
Maybe that’ll work. But better to test the waters with a survey first. Before taking the $25M and up plunge.
