The bottom line on this post is, are you kidding?
I set out to see how many names, total, were on all the waiting lists of our local membership-only pools. (Of which, my family is a member of Vienna Aquatic Club).
Answer: Nearly 2200 names. There’s no barrier to signing up for multiple waiting lists, so how many unique families that is, I don’t know. Also unknown is whether they’d have an interest in an indoor Vienna government-run pool. But there are 2200 or so families, some likely duplicated across lists, on local area membership pool waiting lists. Families that appear prepared to spend $1K a year or so on a pool membership.
Which seems like good news, if you’re talking about building a new pool.
But the sleeper statistic is in the right-hand column above. There, I have taken the water surface area of each local club’s main outdoor pool (or in the case of Dunn Loring, pools), and compared it to the total membership.
All of our local membership pools have a limited number of memberships. All of those pools work out to be around 16 square feet of main pool space, per membership. (Water surface area, excluding baby pools and such.)
And that’s because of pool capacity constraints. (And, likely, parking.) But my main point being that you can’t cram but so many bodies into the pool at once.
I can attest for Vienna Aquatic Club, the main pool gets very crowded at peak times. Really crowded. So I think that, in terms of drop-in-any-time, swim-when-you-want pools, all of our local pools have calibrated membership size and pool size just about right, to handle the summertime demand peaks. Barely.
The lesson I’m taking from this is that the revealed capacity limit of our local outdoor pools is one membership for every 16 square feet of pool water surface area.
Now turn to the proposed Town of Vienna municipal pool:
Source: Town of Vienna Schematic Design Document, for the 9/30/2024 work session of the Town Council, on this Granicus page.
Do the arithmetic: 5500/16 = ~340.
Turns out, the plan isn’t for Vienna to have a municipal pool. It’s for Vienna to have a small municipal pool. Really, almost a tiny municipal pool. And if I take that 5500 square foot pool, and use 16 square feet per family membership as the capacity limit that appears to be a common denominator for local private pools, then that proposed Town of Vienna pool is big enough to accept … 340 family memberships.
Are you kidding me? Did I slip a decimal place somewhere?
I’m not even going to get into the financials here, except to say, that’s a train wreck. Unless people are really keen to spend money on a gym-only (no pool) memberships to this new facility, if pool memberships are limited by pool size for this municipal pool, as they are for all the private pools in the area, the Town can’t sell anywhere near enough memberships to cover the cost of this. Not even close.
Maybe somebody can say they have some clever way around this. And that because fill-in-the-blank-here, the Town can sell vastly more memberships per pool square foot than local private pools can.
But, at first blush, this proposed Vienna municipal pool is much too small a) to make much of a dent in pent-up demand for pool memberships, and b) to be anywhere near economically viable.
Alternatively, maybe the Vienna municipal pool will never be the sort of pool where you send the kids to cool off on a hot day. Because if everybody does that — it’s just like the private-sector pools in the area.
So, at a minimum, if there is a plausible financial plan lurking somewhere in the background here, it’s for a pool whose operation is vastly different from our local private pools. And one that somehow manages to sell a lot more memberships per square foot than our local private pools do.
In the Town’s materials, I didn’t see any mention of the size of the pool setting any sort of constraint on annual memberships sold.
So I just … have no idea.
Summary
Today’s surprise is that the proposed pool is quite small. If it were one of the local private pools, it could have no more than 340 family memberships, due to crowding during peak use periods.
How many the Town is hoping to sell, for a 5500 square foot pool, I have no clue.
Anyway, good news is, there’s a lot of unmet demand for membership in private outdoor swimming pools, in the Vienna area.
Bad news is, I have no clue what the Town thinks is going to happen, after it builds a pool this small, with projected operating costs that high. Other than taxpayers take a beating. Which, increasingly, appears to be in the cards.
I’m not sure I want to look into this any further.
Addendum: Operating loss of 65% at the similarly-sized Reston indoor pool, run by Fairfax County.
Noted in previous posts, Fairfax County financial data show that the Reston Community Center pool covers about 35% of direct operating costs. (Google reference for .pdf of relevant Fairfax budget document.) And, that pool was just about 5000 square feet in water area, prior to recent renovations that added a further 1700 square feet. (Per this reference.)
The full arithmetic, with page references, is the following: Pull up Fairfax Budget Fund 40050 (Google link, .pdf). Reston aquatic center currently runs at a 65% operating loss. (Calculated as $425K in aquatics revenues (page 205), versus $1,212K in direct costs (page 198.)
So the proposed Town of Vienna pool is about the same size as the Reston Community Pool.
The Reston facility received about 20,000 person-visits to their pool in their most recent fiscal year (per Fairfax Budget Fund 40050, reference given above). Which, if they had received $10 per person-visit, would have yielded about $200K in revenues. The actual revenues for aquatics were listed at around $400K. Against (what I assume is a narrowly-defined) direct cost of about $1M.
The Town’s projected operating budget for our facility, with a similar-sized pool, is more like $2M. Everybody seems to think the pool is the big draw, for memberships. But if our visits and revenues, for a pool this size, match those in Reston … taxpayers are going to take a beating.
I guess when I saw that the Vienna plan was for a 30,000 square foot building, I figured that the pool would be the majority of that. Being as how “pool” is how Town staff appear to be selling this. But instead of the pool surface area being about half the square footage of the building — as with the Reston facility — the new Vienna pool/gym is going to about 18% pool.
I didn’t expect that.
So the plan for the Vienna municipal pool/gym is to have a fairly large building, with a small pool. If built to that scale, it can’t handle a lot of pool memberships. And if we get about the same level of business as Reston, with a pool about that size, but our costs are $2M a year …
Yeah, the taxpayers are going to take a beating.
Anyway, I didn’t think that this facility, sold almost entirely on the basis of people mentioning “pool” in an open-ended questionnaire, is going to have a small pool as part of the overall 30,000 square foot building.
I really didn’t expect that.
