The sole point of this post is to present some information on what other government-sponsored pools in the Vienna, VA area charge, and whether or not they break even doing that.
Background
First, find any mention of fees to be charged for using the proposed Vienna Municipal Pool:
Source: Town of Vienna mass mailing circa 10/25/2024.
The Town of Vienna is considering building a municipal pool/weight room/gym, on the land formerly occupied by the Faith Baptist Church. This would be across the street from the ball fields in the middle of town. The proposal is for a roughly 30,000 square foot facility, at an initial cost of around $32M, including the purchase price of the land it sits on.
Plus some yet-to-be determined tax-financed annual cost of running the facility. Pretty much, once the Town builds it, they’ll have to cover any operating deficit that occurs, to the extent that user fees don’t cover the cost of running it. Whatever the deficit may be.
Plus fees for using it? Fees? Who said anything about fees? In line with all the other public pool/gym facilities in this region, the Town’s proposal so far shows a roughly $1000/year family pool/gym membership. Or, alternatively, $10-$12 per person per visit, if you don’t want to commit to a year membership.
I guess I’d better document that, because, somehow, Town staff don’t seem too keen on mentioning it. For example, there’s no mention of that on the mass mailing the Town recently sent to Vienna households, trying to drum up awareness and interest, shown above. (Note that the circled rate below is for Town of Vienna residents, and that, as noted, proposed fees for non-residents would be 25% higher.)
Source: Town of Vienna, 9/30/2024 Town Council work session, consultant’s report, Appendix C, available on this Town of Vienna Granicus web page: https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6874698&GUID=69DD5800-46FA-438D-BFFA-B038BF9A1960&Options=&Search= , on the third page labeled as “Page 4” in that document.
If you got the Town’s postcard pictured above, and somehow didn’t intuit that this pool will come with a $1000/year family membership, you’re not at fault. Or, if you were one of those who responded to the Town’s open-ended survey and asked for a pool, thinking it would be a free, tax-paid pool, ditto. Town Staff have not exactly highlighted the fact that, in addition to the initial cost of construction, and the ongoing taxpayer support to keep the facility running, users of the proposed pool/gym will have to pay rates that are similar to those charged by all the other government-sponsored pools in Fairfax County.
Extended aside. This is probably a done deal, based on the Town doing public business in the dark via the Noah’s Ark Town Council meeting.
I stumbled across the slide below, page 57, of the materials presented at the Town Council’s 9/30/2024 work session, regarding this proposed pool.
Can you interpret it correctly, to know what’s been going on?
My guess is that this is a done deal. Best guess, Town Council has already reached agreement to proceed. The string of meeting, hearings, and “public input” that will ensue merely gives it adequate legal blessing.
That’s because Town Council has already met privately, out of the public view, over this issue.
You may be saying, “that can’t be right”. If Town Council met and discussed this, the law requires that they do that in public. But if you thought that, you’re unaware that the Town now routinely skirts Virginia government sunshine laws by conducting so-called Noah’s Ark meetings.
The Virginia Freedom of Information act requires that, like any other elected officials in the Commonwealth, Vienna Town Council must do all of its business — including discussing a major major expenditure — in public. That’s a big part of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. Anything that can be construed as a meeting of elected officials, to discuss public business, must be done in public.
Except sometimes. The law defines a public meeting as three or more elected or appointed officials gathering to discuss public business.
And so, what does the Town of Vienna do? It has Town Council meet to discuss public business, in a structured process, but only two at a time. Town of Vienna routinely uses the so-called Noah’s Ark loophole in the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
You’d have to have seen this before to be able to interpret this slide in the Town’s consultant’s report correctly. But the “2 on 2” is the giveaway that that Town Council has already discussed this, out of the public eye, by exploiting the Noah’s Ark loophole in the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
Source: Same Granicus page as above, but the document on meeting presentation.
The Town perfected this technique for avoiding public scrutiny in the context of the extremely unpopular, and now-repealed, MAC zoning. You can read a writeup of the Town’s prior use of the Noah’s Ark loophole in Post #480. You can see how out-of-touch that loophole is, with modern technology, in a more speculative Post #505.
In my opinion, the routine use of this ought to be illegal. But it’s not. At least, not so far. And so a loophole intended for (e.g.) the occasional and rare situation involving personal or public safety is now a mainstream technique used by Town officials to avoid public scrutiny.
It is a complete perversion of the spirit and intent of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. But it’s legal. For now.
In any case, if you live in the Town of Vienna, and somehow get the impression that a lot of important issues have already been decided before they are discussed in a Town Council meeting, you’re not imagining that. That doing-public-business-out-of-the-public-eye is achieved, in part, via the Town’s repeated use of the Noah’s Ark loophole.
Do you really think Fairfax County residents will travel farther, and pay more, to use a Vienna municipal pool? Our consultant does.
If you have read the Town’s consultant’s report (op cit), and have the further misfortune to be an economist or business person (or both), or merely a person with common sense, you will note something that is conspicuous by its absence: Any mention of the local competition.
This omission of anything outside the borders of the Town of Vienna leads to the competing views of what the Town is proposing, shown above. Left, is the Town pool’s market area, in a vacuum, as presented by the consultant. On the right, I’ve filled in the location of the three nearby Fairfax County REC Centers. As of noon 10/29/2024, these were located 10, 12, and 14 minutes’ drive from the site of the Town’s proposed pool/gym complex.
My first and obvious point is that, for a chunk of what the consultant counted as market area for the Town pool, residents are actually closer to a County-run alternative.
I will again state that those Fairfax County REC Centers are extremely nice facilities, and that the Oakmont REC Center is the nicest gym that my wife and I have ever used. Go visit the airy, spacious cardio/weight room there if you don’t believe me.
Source: Stolen from Yelp reviews for Oakmont (nee Oak Marr) REC Center.
Not only are the County REC Centers closer to many people in the consultant’s putative market area, but they cost less than the Town is proposing to charge to non-Town residents. Per visit, the Town proposes to charge non-residents more than the County charges for use of the REC Centers. For example, from the listed fees above, $12, plus 25% up-charge =$15 per adult for a one-day pass to the Vienna pool/gym, versus $11 a day for use of any County REC Center. (Fairfax County rates are on the general admission section of this web page.)
So, to be crystal clear, to gin up some estimated user count for the proposed Town municipal pool, and so produce a relatively modest estimate of the annual operating deficit for a Vienna pool, the Town’s consultant implicitly assumed that some nearby Fairfax County residents would travel further, and pay considerably more, to use a proposed Vienna municipal pool/gym, instead of the existing County REC Center pool/gym/plus facilities.
The only technical point is that chunks of what got counted as the market for a Town of Vienna pool are completely unrealistic. And so, the projected revenues are unrealistically high. And so, the estimated annual cost to the taxpayers is unrealistically low.
That, unless you think that “less convenient, costs more” is a great marketing strategy.
I have no idea whether this matters much or not, for the projected tax-financed operating deficit.
But my point is, neither does Vienna Town Council. And they’re going to vote on it anyway.
Extras for experts. If you really want to grasp the importance of this point, focus on the fact that ~80% of persons in the proposed market area for the Vienna pool live outside of the Town of Vienna. (Market area was described as 100K persons, TOV has about 16.5K residents.) For those outside the TOV boundary, annual membership in the Vienna pool/gym would cost more than joining the network of Fairfax County REC Centers. My wife and I pay $1050 a year for REC Center access. (“It’s cheaper than a heart attack.”) If we didn’t live literally in the Town of Vienna, we’d pay a proposed ($960 + 25% up-charge) = $1200 for annual membership in the Vienna pool/gym. As proposed, the Vienna pool/gym is both more expensive, and less comprehensive, than its direct competitor, the three local Fairfax County REC Centers, for more than 80% of what the consultant counted as Town of Vienna market area. The important point being that there’s a fair chance that the consultants have greatly overstated likely membership sales, because, in effect, they’re counting on generating $1200/year annual memberships from a population that has already has access to cheaper memberships to a wider array of larger gym/pool facilities.
First, seek to understand your competitors.
Ignoring anything outside the Town boundary is a long-standing tradition here. But in this case, I thought it would be informative to know what other governments in this region have already done. E.g., how many pool/gym centers are nearby, what do they charge, what are their annual operating deficits, and so on. If there was any mention, of any of this stuff, at materials presented at the 9/20/2024 Town Council work session, they managed to elude me. So I’m pretty sure that none of this was put on the Vienna Town Council’s radar screen.
But they’re going to vote on it regardless.
About half our local governments provide a tax-supported pool or pool/gym, about half do not. Fairfax County and Herndon do. Fairfax County also runs the Reston Community Center. Fairfax City and Falls Church City do not.
The Fairfax County REC Centers break even. The relatively small pool at the Reston Community Center makes a huge loss. (Revenues cover about 40% of direct costs of running the pool.)
At no point do any of these profit-loss figures account for the initial capital investment, or (in most cases) anything like depreciation of the major capital components of these facilities over their expected lifetime. (E.g., the cost of re-roofing every 20 years or so, cost of new HCAC on the same timeline.)
For Herndon, their budget documents do not reveal the level of surplus or deficit for their large pool/gym complex. (And, cynic that I am, I’m betting that if they broke even or made money, Herndon would show that.)
My interpretation of the above — the only known break-even facilities in the area are huge — tells me that there are probably significant “economies of scale” in running one of these things. Which means that a small government-run pool/gym is almost certainly not going to break even.
Conclusion
I’m neither for nor against the Town Staff’s proposal to have a Vienna municipal pool/gym.
But I react badly to sloppy analysis, particularly when the errors favor showing a rosier-than-realistic scenario. And I react badly to Town staff advocating for a position, and attempting to sway public opinion, by providing a one-sided view of the issue.
There ain’t no such thing as a free public pool in Fairfax County. At least, not that I’ve run across, although Fairfax is considering income-related adjustments that might result in that in the future. And the longer Vienna promotes this pool, without mentioning the user fees, the less honest that public taxpayer-funded advocacy seems. And the more risk of backlash as the fees become known.
In Vienna, we have three Fairfax County indoor pools within a few minutes’ drive of the center of town. These pools are large, and their operating costs are fully funded by user fees. Of the three other large government entities in Fairfax County (Herndon, Fairfax City, Falls Church city), only one has a government-run indoor pool. And for that one, the operating profit and loss are not made public. Reston’s pool — a small facility run by Fairfax County — makes a large annual loss.
Whether the Town commits its taxpayers to this is neither here nor there for me. But whatever the decision is, it ought to be made in the full light of day, with all the relevant information on the table.
