Just for the sake of argument, assume that it has already somehow been decided that Vienna must build a pool. How would you try to get the best value for the taxpayer dollar, in that case?
First I’ll describe what I’d do, if I were running this show.
Then I’ll run through some advantages and drawbacks.
Then I’ll explain why I think this option makes sense. If you’re bound and determined to have a Vienna pool.
An alternative proposal.
I would build an outdoor membership pool. Essentially modeled after our many existing outdoor membership pools. But I’d make access more equitable, and otherwise adapt how those pools are run, to the public setting.
The point is to guarantee that everybody’s kids get some convenient opportunity to swim in the summer sunshine. (Awww.) And not just the kids of those of us who managed to snag a membership to one of the local private pools. In a region with generally long waiting times for access to the nearest pools, that should be an attractive advantage of living in the Town of Vienna, for young families moving to this area.
So, borrowing from the prior Q-and-A post, this would be an olympic-sized pool crammed into the existing three-acre site. As pictured above. Or, more likely, two or more separate pools, totaling the one-third-acre of water surface of an olympic pool.
This would not be pretty, as the proposed gym/pool building would. In fact, it would require (another!) big ugly concrete parking garage. But, given that we’re already slated to have one of those just down the street (at the Patrick Henry Garage and Library), I find it hard to object to another one based on the looks.
That ugly garage would have two saving graces. First, it would double as parking for the adjacent ball fields in the off-season. Second, it would serve as an excellent sound barrier for the adjacent homes (because, I can tell you, summer outdoor pools get really noisy. I sure wouldn’t want to live next to one.) That second point strongly suggests off-season use as pickleball courts, if that could be accommodated, as pickleball generates a high degree of nuisance noise.. I address that in the section on off-season use.
The Town would still be free to “schedule” the pool, within reason, as the local private pools do. This would accommodate a reasonable load of (e.g.) water aerobics class, swimming lessons, early morning swim-team practices, and so on. With the understanding that these would be scheduled for non-peak periods. In addition, you’d likely reserve at least a section of the pool for lap swimming at all times. The rest of the pool and time is generally “open swim”, that is, kids just messing around, outdoors, in the summer. Which, to be clear, would be the main point of this pool, by analogy to the local private pools.
Swim meets are a problem. The pool closes to general use during swim meets and swim team practices. Practices are not an issue because they can be scheduled for the early morning. But swim meets displace all other users of the pool, for the duration of the meet. It seems like, in fairness, there should be a fairly stiff fee charged for the privilege of doing that. I’d like to accommodate a swim team, but not to the extent of, in effect, offering them exclusive use of the valuable pool space, for extended periods of time, for free.
For the physical plant, beyond having a big rectangular hole in the ground, or two, my feeling is that no amount of small-child-amusement-devices is too many. So, e.g., for sure, I’d have one of those water-squirts-out-of-the-pavement spaces, and so on. Whatever reasonably safe, water-oriented amusements would fit. The less space that they exclusively occupy, the better.
Finally, I have no clue whether this is an economically viable proposal or not. On the one hand, you’re not building and finishing an indoor structure, other than the locker rooms. On the other hand, you start off by paying for a big concrete parking garage. My sense is that you could build and equip one of these for less than $26M, but that’s just a guess at this point. (E.g., I think the Town chipped in about $4.5M to buy into around 100 spaces in the Patrick Henry parking garage. So in round numbers, you’d pay $9M for a 200-space garage, leaving just $14M to build the pool and locker rooms.)
I suspect, but cannot prove, that this is an economically viable proposal as far as covering operating costs goes, based on the thousands of names on local outdoor pool waiting lists, and the need to sell just 900 annual memberships to cover twice the actual observed annual operating costs of the (half-as-large) Vienna Aquatic Club pool. The goal here is for Vienna to do as Fairfax does, and have the pool/gym users at least cover the annual operating cost of the facility.
But, people are funny, and even in this day, with a community as upscale as Vienna, you might have people turn up their noses at the thought of using a government-run pool. So, as with any expenditure of millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money, surely you’d want to survey the population first to make sure this whole idea isn’t too far off base.
But, bear in mind that this proposed outdoor “fun-centric” pool bears the same long-term financial risks as the current Town of Vienna proposal. Once you put that big hole in the ground, the taxpayers are on the hook for keeping it running, in perpetuity. If it turns out that the taxpayers have to keep filling that hole in the ground with cash every year, well, that’s just the way it is.
Off-season use
A huge drawback to this is that the pool is only open in the summer. It’s inherently wasteful to take this rare commodity — land in Vienna — and allow it to sit idle three-quarters of the year. If you’re spending tax dollars on this, you are burdened to find some secondary, off-season uses.
1 Pickleball. One obvious off-season use would be to paint pickleball courts onto the pool surround, adjacent to the parking garage. I say that because a) the standard pickleball court is quite small (60′ x 40′, say, per this reference)? b) the parking garage (if properly constructed) would block the noise from reaching the neighbors, and c) the pool surround is going to be concrete anyway, so why not, and d) apparently, pickleball got a lot of votes on the Town’s original “survey” regarding uses of this property. You’d have to use de-mountable net posts, but that’s a standard item.
2 Overflow parking for the adjacent ball fields. The area around the ball fields seems to get parked pretty full, at peak times. Having a big municipal parking lot across the street would be helpful. But this also brings up the difficult of keeping that parking for pool patrons only, in the summer. I have no ready solution for that.
3 Year-round pool, via three-season air dome, subscription-only, for some part of the overall pool square footage. A final option is to split the pool into two physical sections, and cover one section in an air dome (“pool bubble”) outside of the summer season. That would allow three-season indoor use of the portion of the pool covered by the dome.
Source: This place.
The huge surprise to me is that these pool-bubble things are remarkably cheap. Or I am looking at something misleading. A dome big enough to cover a minimum-for-swim-team pool (call it 85′ x 50′), with blowers and heaters, works out to just over $40K. If those last 10 years, and so on, the amortized capital cost of the dome add-on is just $4K/year. Clearly, heating it would be a huge expense, but … once you’ve gone to the expense to build a pool, it’s entirely plausible that you may, in fact, have enough demand in the area to pay for running at least a small three-season dome-covered pool.
A second randomly-selected on-line supplier (here) suggest $12/square foot for the entire package, including lights. For the same dimensions as above, that also works out to about $40K. So … yeah, that appears to be a real price, for one of these, big enough to cover a pool that’s about one-third the size of an olympic pool.
Your choice of colors!
I know nothing about these domes, so I’ll stop there. I only include this much information because I was floored at how cheap these were, in the context of the chunk of change that Vienna is getting ready to lay out.
It’s an environmentally-unsound option due to the need to heat this large un-insulated surface. I am sure it would pay the Town to install something other than inefficient resistance electric heating that comes with the standard package. Adding three-season pool use would increase the carbon footprint of the pool complex, either way, just less with, say, a heat pump.
That said, caveat emptor for any of this. If you think about it, off-season use of this facility may generate significant costs, versus, in essence, putting on the pool cover, turning off the lights, and locking all the doors until next year. Depends, among other things, on the cost of keeping the place open, and the revenues the off-season uses generate. If few enough use it in the off-season, and it costs you money to keep it open, it may not be worth it to keep it open. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. ‘tsall I’m saying.
Equitable access to the pool.
Annual pool memberships would be offered, analogous to the local private pools. The membership to this pool would cost about the same as that of other local private pools, plus or minus, because there’s no such thing as magic, and the Town would face at least the same level of operating costs as the local pools. These memberships would guarantee you access to the pool at all times other than special events such as swim-team practices or meets. In other words, these memberships would be a right to use the pool during peak periods of demand, and any other time that the pool was open for general use.
The Town could, at its option, offer some income-related reduced price memberships for lower-income residents.. But this being the Town of Vienna, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
The number of these “unlimited” annual memberships would have to be limited, at least initially, to no more than 900. That’s based on the congestion I observe at my local pool during peak periods of demand. Any more than that, and you can’t guarantee access to the pool on a hot mid-summer Saturday.
Memberships would be for one year at a time, and there would be no right to renew. They would be offered first to Town of Vienna residents. If some remained, they would be opened up to non-residents, possibly for a higher annual fee. So it would be first-and-foremost a Town of Vienna thing. And if demand for those memberships exceeded supply, at either stage of that process, the right to buy a membership would be allocated by annual lottery. (If not, then of course, if you wanted to renew your existing membership, you could.)
While my knee-jerk reaction was to allocate the tickets at random, in fact, in the 21st century, surely, for people outside the Town who want access, you could allocated it by closest-first, giving preference to those whose addresses are nearest the Town boundary. Don’t know if you’d want to do that, but it seems like there is no technical barrier to doing that.
The key point is that unlike the local private pools, everybody in Vienna who was interested would have an equal opportunity to buy a membership, in any given year. This equity consideration seems like a fitting way to modify the current private membership pool model, for a government-sponsored role.
In particular, I note that my pool, and I think a lot of the local private pools, allow you to convey your membership with your house. (Otherwise, if you give up your membership, you have to sell it back to the pool, for them to resell.) I’d be willing to bet that this unusual feature is a vestige of the desegregation era.
Buyers-but-not-users. There’s still an issue of people buying annual memberships, but not using them. In a Town with this level of income, you really have to consider that possibility, given the price the Town would charge. I would not bar that practice, and I would not deny subsequent memberships. I would simply adjust the initial total of 900 upwards, to the extent that, on average, the presence of these buy-but-never-use customers reduce peak pool crowding. Basically, let folks buy them regardless, and just adjust the total memberships upward if, on average, enough people buy them buy do not use them.
Swim team clause: Separately, I see that an annual lottery may screw up any use of the pool for swim team enthusiasts, because you and your kids might get kicked out of the pool, at random, in any given year. You can patch that over by offering a different type of membership that allows access to swim-team-related practices and events only, for those who want to remain on the swim team, but were not fortunate enough to get an annual membership for the year. I would not, under any circumstances, give swim team families preference in the general membership lottery, over others.
Completely unlike the local private membership pools, a Town-run pool would offer the option of one-day pool passes. And so, in theory, everyone in the Town of Vienna that wanted summertime access to a local outdoor pool would have it, to a degree. (Again, seeking better equity of access.) But those would only be usable if the pool and associated parking lots still had room. So, effectively, daily access passes would be limited to non-peak periods, if the pool and parking routine fill at peak times. And for those with a strong interest in using the pool, the membership would still be desirable.
The presence of day passes makes the admission decision difficult at peak periods, because you ideally always want to have room — in the parking garage and the pool — for any annual-membership-holders who show up. (So, how do you know how many day-pass holder to let in, early on what should be a peak day?) Surely there’s an operations research answer to a best way to do this.
There is a seemingly-difficult business decision, in that by offering day passes, you may reduce the demand for season-long memberships. In other words, those who were “on the fence” about buying a season pass might pass on that, if they knew they could by a la carte access to the pool. My observation from Oakmont is that almost all of their business is memberships. Not clear if that would hold true for a Vienna municipal pool.
The Town would, of course, have a web page that showed the current status of the pool, in real time. So if you got the urge to take your kids down to the pool, and didn’t have a membership, you could check that page first before you mentioned it to your kids.
Part 2: A quick pros and cons.
Pros:
- An outdoor pool is the epitome of community-centric, family-centric suburban fun.
- In this immediate area, this public-outdoor-rectangular-pool would be unique to Vienna.
- Unlike the Town’s proposal, this is not simply a small-scale copy of the nearby REC Centers.
- This fills a niche with plausibly proven demand, as evidenced by long membership waiting lists at private outdoor pools in this area.
- The private sector cannot supply more outdoor pool memberships in this area (explained in prior posts), giving a first-principles argument in favor of government action in this area. (By contrast, you can buy into private gyms, with or without indoor pools, all over this locality).
- Plausibly, might even cost less than the facility proposed by the Town.
- Possibly, a lower overall carbon footprint than an enclosed gym. (For sure, you wouldn’t have to air-condition it.)
Plus, pickleball without annoying the neighbors.
Cons:
- Largely single-season use.
- Other gym components are lost (e.g, weights, cardio, indoor ball courts). But more on that below.
- Fewer opportunities for permanent employment. (Most of the employment would be summer-season employment only).
- This is not the product of the official, Town-guided processes that arrived at the Town’s proposed mini-REC-Center.
- This might add to time-to-completion.
- But more likely, this is dead-on-arrival, specifically because it wasn’t arrived at by the Town-Staff-guided process.
And, likely, kinda ugly. Good news is, we get choice of colors on the dome. Bad news, we have to color-coordinate with the garage. Dare I say it? This might be viewed as a bit down-scale, for Vienna. But I say, add some rusty 8′ chain link fence, and I think we’ve got ourselves a look.
Part 3: Rationale and justification
First, I cede the decision to those who want a pool.
That decision — pool or no pool — is way above my pay grade.
It’s an essentially political decision, for our politicians to decide. So I’m just going to start with the assumption that, somehow, it has been decided that we want a Vienna pool.
My sole goal, then, is to try provide the greatest value for the taxpayer dollar, conditional on our elected representatives having decided that it’s time for Vienna to have a pool. To be clear, “value” to an economist is focused on what the consumer wants, not what necessarily what is objectively best in terms of (say) population average health, or in the look and feel of what passes for our downtown area.
Next, identify a proper role of government in this situation.
First, any traditional role of government in looking after “the poor” does not apply to Vienna. At least, not on average. We do have some families whose incomes are below the Federal poverty level. But they are rare, and they are not the principal market for this pool. They are rare enough that offering sliding-scale (income-related) discounts for pool passes should have minimal impact on the pool’s finances. (Such discounts are now being considered by Fairfax County, for their REC Centers and other facilities (reference).
Further, as the Vienna “tear-down boom” proceeds, with small houses being replaced by houses that are as large as the law allows, the average income of Vienna residents continues to rise. Simply put, economic forces are slowly displacing the middle class here, in what I have termed the McLeanification of Vienna (Post #308).
As a result, the task at hand is to build a public pool appropriate for the wealthiest town or city in Virginia (reference of unknown quality). That’s who we are now. And if current trends continue, we are only going to be more-so, in the future.
Second, in the U.S., we generally frown upon having The Government directly provide services that The Market can provide just as well. People need to eat, but we don’t generally have government-run farms. We have government-distributed food, but only as a byproduct of agricultural price supports. If we are collectively concerned with the ability of the poor to eat, and seek a government solution, we give people money-equivalents (SNAP), and let the market do the rest. (Putting aside the presence of inner-city “food deserts” lacking grocery stores, it’s more efficient to do it this way.)
For completeness, I note that I’m ignoring all the classic, agreed-upon roles of government, e.g., “provide for the common defense”. This isn’t a discourse on government. I’m really focused on a justification for, essentially, discretionary spending in the general area of public parks. I think we generally still agree that government has a role in providing some parks? But these days, I’m not quite sure of anything.
So the core of the task is to look for something of value that the Citizens of Vienna want, but that the private market cannot provide. Or provide well. Or provide cheaply, or conveniently. Or, equitably, whatever that may mean to you.
Next, identify unfilled consumer wants in this area
The only demonstrated want that we have around here, relevant to this issue, that cannot be filled by private enterprise, is for a new outdoor membership pool.
Arguably, a close second is the whole swim-team thing, whether indoor or outdoor. For those of us outside of this culture, local private pools maintain a sort of swimming Little League (NVSL). Each private pool has a kids swim team, the teams compete over the summer, and kids compete with other kids of their own age. (I’m not sure here, but I think this implies that if you can’t buy a pool membership, you can’t get your kids into the (equivalent of the swimming) Little League. Which, if true, would be kind of sad.) Separately, local high school swim teams need indoor pool space during the school year, and these teams often practice at the Fairfax REC Centers. So an outdoor pool would only satisfy the demand for Little League-type summer swim teams, not the off-season demand for school-based swim teams.
The inability of private enterprise to expand the number of such pool memberships was explained in prior posts. Those existing private membership outdoor pools are creatures of law and regulation, dating back to the era of desegregation. They have huge waiting list times for membership, and it’s unlikely that those waiting lists will ever go away.
Secondarily, there’s always the argument that while private enterprise may provide those services, they are too expensive. And, sure, that may be true for some, or for many. But the economist’s answer is that if so, and if the market for those services is competitive — and I would argue that the for-profit gym market is downright cut-throat — then the costs to the consumer for those privately-offered gym services are more-or-less an accurate reflection of the resources used in providing the service. If you break it down, this argument is really no different from saying that, e.g., cars are too expensive. Arguably true, but not in and of itself a rationale for having the government manufacture and sell cars.
finally, Know your market segments, or why, as a life-long weight lifter, I really don’t care if the Town’s gym includes a weight room.
The point of this section is that a lot of the services proposed for the Town’s pool/gym have no “synergy” with a pool, or each other, and do not encourage any type of “community” interaction. In effect, the proposed gym is an amalgamation of almost completely separate exercise facilities, that just happen to be grouped in the same building.
For much of what’s been proposed, in my opinion, on any given day, users of different types of exercise will share the locker rooms, and not much else. So, other than convenience in constructing the building, there’s not a lot of reason to co-locate all of those exercise activities in one building.
Let me illustrate by talking about the weight/cardio room.
I use the gym for weight lifting and cardio. Nothing intense. Just a couple of 45-minute sessions a week.
First — just to get this out of the way — there’s no way the Town can offer a cardio/weight room that’s as nice as the one at the Oakmont REC Center. They don’t have the space. Which means they can’t have the variety of equipment, and they can’t offer the overall spaciousness that Oakmont can. And, speaking as guy who spent a lot of time lifting weights in dark, low-ceilinged basement gyms, once I saw Oakmont, there was no going back. (FWIW, the weight rooms at the other two local REC Centers aren’t as nice as Oakmont, either.)
So, from the start, the Town’s offering for weight/cardio is going to be inferior to the nearest REC Center. It’s just a matter of space. And of the number and variety of machines that a smaller space implies.
My second observation is that there is little “social interaction” among the weight-lifting-and-cardio crowd. Generally speaking, we’re there to get our business done and be gone. Not a lot of chit-chat going on in the weight room, other than between people who arrived together.
Third, as mentioned earlier, weight/cardio rooms are not family-friendly. Most bar small kids due to safety concerns. So these are generally not facilities where the whole family can enjoy (?) lifting weights or mindlessly plodding on a treadmill together.
My final observation is that, in any one visit to the gym, there’s almost zero overlap between the weight/cardio users and the pool users. The pool users are there to swim, the weight/cardio users are there to weight/cardio, and never the twain shall meet. Let me just say that I’ve never gotten a whiff of chlorine off somebody exercising in the weight room.
All of this tells me that there is essentially zero synergy between pool, and weight/cardio rooms, or, on any given day, between the people using the pool and the people using the weight/cardio rooms. For the typical user, for the typical visit, you could just as easily have those two gym functions located in physically separate buildings.
This is all by way of saying that I think demand for a pool would be almost completely unaffected by the lack of a weight/cardio room. Nor would those weight/cardio users be missed, in generating a “sense of community” in the facility.
(Admittedly, this argument ignores families that split up at the door to the facility, with each member off to do their preferred exercise. But, honestly, I just never see that at the Oakmont REC Center, so I don’t think it’s common.)
Finally, places offering weights and cardio are a dime a dozen. It’s the core of what for-profit gyms offer. So, for a user like me, the Town would be providing a service that is readily supplied by the private sector. For the segment of your market that is weight/cardio only, there would be no strong attraction to using the Town-supplied facility versus others, at roughly equivalent prices.
My point is that of the two big-ticket items in the Town proposal, the second (weight/cardio) really has almost nothing to do with first (pool). There is no unmet need that the Town is filling, with its own weight/cardio room. And, I suspect, it adds almost nothing to the “sense of community” that a Town gym might provide.
For exercise classes and maybe some of the other items, there’s an argument that they help foster a “sense of community”. But by and large, co-locating these disparate exercise services in the same building is mostly a convenience for running the place (e.g., just one receptionist needed), and offers no particular “community” benefit.
Conclusion: When I ask where the value is, the answer comes up “outdoor pool”.
The Town’s proposal is for a small, something-for-everybody, year-round gym. Not a bad concept, for a government-run facility. And well-proven, given that it’s essentially identical in outline to the Oakmont REC Center, build in 1988.
But the small scale of operations, particularly of the pool, is going to be a killer, cost-wise. Particularly when you’re located near three County REC Centers, whose lower costs are going to cap what you are going to get away with charging. (And, that small pool does not meet the needs of one very swim-intensive market segment, the “swim team” crowd.)
But in order to have a much bigger pool — indoor or outdoor — you’re going to have to have a parking garage. That’s just the reality of the fact that cars take up a lot of space. Were it not for the fact that there’s going to be a big parking garage right down the street (the majority of the Patrick Henry lot is going to be for the garage, the library is more-or-less the front facade of the garage), I’d hesitate to suggest this. But we’ve already got one big public garage in the works, so it’s hard to see where another one somehow spoils the neighborhood.
There’s no unique rationale for government action in building yet another indoor pool, given the plenitude of gyms — public and private — that either offer the same pool/weight/cardio/etc combination of service, or offer some subset of that. Both the private and public sectors already provide these.
Nor is there a lot of value-added evident in Vienna doing that, other than for the sense of community you build by exercising with your neighbors, rather than strangers. That, and saving a few minutes’ travel time to any of the three nearby REC Centers.
But a “fun-centric”/exercise-second outdoor pool is something that the private sector cannot provide more of, in this area. And, that outdoor pool experience — bunch of kids splashing in the pool — is exactly the sort of activity that you think about in terms of community recreation. (As opposed to, say, weight lifting.)
For free, you’d get to throw in some off-season pickleball courts that wouldn’t annoy the neighbors, due to the presence of the sound-stopping garage.
And, maybe if there’s demand for it, you could add a small three-season bubble, for part of the pool. That’s an energy hog, I think, but it would accommodate a known market for (e.g.) swim team practices. (But, as with the pool itself, only if that market is big enough to cover the cost of owning and operating the bubble.
To recap:
- The one thing that money can’t buy around here is more memberships to outdoor pools.
- The private sector cannot fill this demand because our outdoor pools are legal, zoning, and economic relics of a bygone era.
- There are literally thousands of names on the local private outdoor pool waiting lists, begging to drop $1K a year on an outdoor pool membership.
- I can’t be the only one who sees this as an opportunity.
