Author: chogan@directresearch.com

 

Today I sent the following, in plain-text form, to Town Council, via Council@vienna.gov.

Edit:  And had it returned by the Town’s email system, for an incorrect address,  because the mail-to link on the Town’s Annex Reimagined web page literally addresses the mail to mailto:council@vienna.gov.

So now I’ve re-sent it, manually overwriting the address to remove the mailto:.

I have a decrepit old computer and old software, but so maybe it’s my fault.  Or, maybe if you know HTTP, you can figure out what’s going on, as the mailto link looks like this, when page source is shown:  I note that ASCII 109, 97, 105, 108 spells out “mail”, so yeah, their mailto link, if you want to send something to Town Council, is mal-configured.

to&nbsp;<a href="mailto:&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;&#99;&#111;&#117;&#110;&#99;&#105;&#108;&#64;&#118;&#105;&#101;&#110;&#110;&#97;&#118;&#97;&#46;&#103;&#111;&#118;&#63;&#115;&#117;&#98;&#106;&#101;&#99;&#116;&#61;&#67;&#111;&#109;&#109;&#117;&#110;&#105;&#116;&#121;&#32;&#70;&#101;&#101;&#100;&#98;&#97;&#99;&#107;&#58;&#32;&#65;&#110;&#110;&#101;&#120;&#32;&#47;&#32;&#77;&#101;&#97;&#108;&#115;&#32;&#84;&#97;&#120;&#32;&#73;&#110;&#99;&#114;&#101;&#97;&#115;&#101;">council@viennava.gov</a> 

That doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy with regard to the upcoming decisions.

Continue reading Post #2051: My letter to Vienna Town Council regarding the proposed Vienna pool/gym.

 

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
  

 

I would be remiss if I did not finish up on the Vienna pool.

You may or may not recall earlier, when I likened Town of Vienna decision-making to a splinter.

Without taking that analogy one step further, this post will tersely explain what’s fundamentally wrong with the Town of Vienna decision-making process, in this case. Continue reading Post #2049: Like a splinter, or, the left hand forgets what the right hand has done.

 

This is my final post, for now, on the Town of Vienna proposed pool/gym complex.   I assume readers know this is about a roughly 30,000 square foot municipal gym (indoor pool, weight room, and other facilities) that the Town of Vienna, VA is considering building, at a construction cost (including land) of about $33M.

In addition, ongoing annual operating costs will be covered by a combination of user fees (for Town residents as well as others), and taxes.

Here, I’m trying to tell the story as I think it should have been told in the first place, starting with what Town Council decided in 2014, the last time a Town of Vienna municipal pool was discussed.

Update 11/11/2024:  Minor addendum added to end of post. 

Update 11/13/2024 to drive home the point that the revenue (and hence, tax-financed annual deficit) projections for this facility simply ignore all competition for the gym/pool dollar in this area.  In so doing, Town Staff’s presentation literally ignores the fundamental reason that Town Council turned down a Vienna pool in 2014.

Question:  Didn’t the Town of Vienna go through this “let’s build a pool” discussion just a few years ago?

Answer:  Yes.  The 2014 Vienna Town Council turned down a proposal to add a pool to the roughly $15M expansion of the gym and other facilities in the Vienna Community Center.

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Question:  Why was a tax-financed Vienna pool/gym turned down in 2014?

Answer:  Based on news reporting at the time (Brian Trompeter, 2014 insidenova.com):

Per Council Member Polychrones, we already had three government-run pool/gym complexes nearby.  These are the large Fairfax County REC Centers, located about 10, 12, and 14 minutes’ drive from Town Hall.

 

Per Council Member Kelleher, a Vienna facility would be inefficiently small, compared to the scale of operations of the Fairfax REC Centers.  It would have high average cost per user, due to its small size, and would not be competitive with the Fairfax facilities.

 

The Mayor at that time characterized a pool as as a want, not a need, and was unwilling to burden future Town Councils with the significant additional debt required to build a pool.

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Was a summary of the 2014 Town Council decision and rationale provided to 2024 Town Council?

Answer:  No.  Not as far as I have been able to tell.  I can now claim to have looked at all the publicly-available documents posted for the Town Council 9/30/2024 work session on this topic.  I have yet to see a reference to the 2014 Vienna Town Council decision.

In other words, as far as the presented materials go (Town of Vienna, “Annex Reimagined” web page), the current discussion started with “what to do with this Annex property”.  The 2014 Vienna pool effort does not appear to be mentioned.

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Added 11/13/2024:  Question:  How does this new proposal address the fundamental economic problems raised in the 2014 Town Council “No” vote?

Answer:  It doesn’t.  It simply ignores them, and removes all* mention of the Fairfax County REC Centers from the proposal.

* I see there is one list, in one document, showing examples of pools that currently exist across Fairfax County, that does indeed mention two REC centers, one nearby, one at the other side of the county.  So “all” is an exaggeration.  But the point is, there’s no discussion of the relevance of having three REC centers with pools located within easy driving distance of the proposed new Vienna pool.

The proposal a) does not discuss the local competition for the gym/pool dollar, b) shows a “market area” map that omits the three large Fairfax County REC Centers that are direct competitors to the Vienna facility in this exact market of government-run gym/pool complexes, c) shows estimate of the annual taxpayer-funded losses for this facility under the assumption that there is literally no competition in its core market area of the Town of Vienna, and d) contains just one ambiguously-worded line, on one slide, that maybe lets the informed reader understand that.

Recall that the main reason for the 2014 Town Council’s “no” vote was the presence of the three large nearby Fairfax County REC Centers that already offer gym/pool recreation opportunities.

Below is the market area for the proposed Vienna facility, as shown to Town Council, from the Town’s consultant’s report.  Note that there is no mention of the Fairfax County REC Centers.

Source:  Presentation posted with the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session.

Here’s the same map, where I have added the locations of the three large Fairfax County gym/pool complexes (REC Centers).  These are 10, 12, and 14 minutes’ drive from Town Hall.  This map was NOT shown to Town Council:

Source:  Presentation posted with the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session.  Annotations in red are mine.

Below is the single mention, that I could find, in the entire set of documents presented to Town Council on 9/30/2024, hinting that the projected demand for this facility assumes that it faces no direct competition:

Source:  Presentation posted with the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session.

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Question:  What has changed since that 2014 decision that would allow the current Town Council to ignore a fundamental objection raised by 2014 Town Council?

Answer:  Nothing about the fundamental objections raised in 2014 changed.  The REC Centers are still operating, along with all the other pool/gym options in this area. 

However:

But now, the Town finds itself the owner of a three acre property it bought and used as a temporary police station, during construction of the new police station.  And, apparently, the Town may have an increased willingness to take on more debt and higher meals taxes than it did ten years ago.

In 2020, the Town of Vienna floated the largest bond issue in its history.  The proceeds were used (I believe) in part to pay off the cost overrun on the recently-expanded community center, mainly to build the new police station that’s about three times the size of the prior one, and also to buy the tract of land formerly occupied by Faith Baptist Church. 

(But, credit where credit is due, the Town’s Director of Finance had a perfect sense of timing.  I looked at that bond issue in some detail, a few years back, and I believe that the week the Town issued those bonds, municipal bond interest rates hit their all-time lows since at least the time of the Great Depression.  And have gone up since.  So, if you’re going to borrow a ton of money, it’s a plus to borrow at the lowest municipal bond interest rates in my lifetime.)

The Town used the former Baptist church, and its parking lot, as the temporary police headquarters during the construction of the new Police Station building.  Now that the new police station is finished, the Town has torn down all the old church buildings.  Currently, it’s an empty unused plot with a parking lot on one side.

The Town still owns three acres that church/temporary police station sat on.  This is the property that Town Staff refer to now as “The Annex”.

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Where?

On Park Center Street, downtown, just up from Town Hall.  The former Faith Baptist Church/Town of Vienna Temporary Police Station property is across the street from, and a bit catty-corner to, the ball fields downtown. 

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Question:  What has been proposed for this new indoor pool/gym?

Answer:  This is best described as a one-third-size version of a Fairfax County REC Center. 

It’s a gym, that is, it’s a place where people go to exercise indoors. The main features of this gym include an indoor pool, a weight room for resistance training (weight machines) and cardio (treadmills, exercise bikes, etc.), plus (e.g.) empty rooms for exercise classes, stretching, free weights, and so on.

Based on the materials presented at the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session, the building would be about 30,000 square feet.  The Town now says 25,000.  I don’t know why,  The pool water area is 5,500 square feet.  I think the proposed weight room (or maybe weight/cardio) was about 4,000 square feet.  And the rest of the building would be smaller spaces such as exercise classrooms, ball courts, and similar.

In terms of the physical building, other than the smaller size and more limited range of exercise options, a difference between the Town of Vienna proposal and a Fairfax REC Center is that the Town’s proposal includes a modest water slide, separated from the main pool.

If you are confused about what, exactly, this proposed gym/pool structure is, that may be because the Town continues to emphasize the potential “fun” and “community” aspects of the indoor pool, for kids.  And in addition, the Town also espouses the benefits of a pool for exercise.  In effect, billing this pool as something for everybody. 

In my (admittedly limited) experience, it is unusual for an indoor open rectangular gym pool (i.e., not a Great-Wolf-Lodge amusement-park-style pool), to be used as “fun” pool to any significant extent.  My experience with the Fairfax REC Centers is that, in practice, the pools are used (almost?) exclusively for scheduled exercise, things like lap swimming, group swim lessons, and water aerobics for the elderly.  Vienna, by contrast, insists that their much smaller proposed indoor gym pool will be both an “exercise” pool, and a “fun” (that is, un-structured open-swim) pool.  If true, that would make the Vienna pool significantly different from the exercise-centric pools at the three local Fairfax County REC Centers.

Some of the remaining areas in the gym will be adult-use only.  In particular, every gym I’ve ever used has barred children (under 13, say) from the weight/cardio room due to safety concerns.  (If nothing else, there are a lot of bad pinch points in a weight room of any sort.)

 

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Question:  Is this facility going to be free to use?

Answer:  No.  The Town’s proposal shows a roughly $1000/year family membership fee.  That’s similar to the fees charges by Fairfax County and others (Herndon, Reston) for similar public gym facilities. 

From the proposal presented to Town Council 9/30/2024, available as a .pdf, Appendex C, from the Town of Vienna “Annex Reimagined” web page.

Importantly, the revenues from those user fees are integral to the financial projections for the facility — the estimate of what taxpayers will have to pay yearly to keep it going.  The Town may not yet have made its final dollar-price decision, but significant user fee revenue is NOT optional for the current proposal.  To be clear, nobody is recommending or suggesting that this pool be free to use.  It’s just that the Town somehow keeps forgetting to mention that, in its public-facing information.

As of 11/9/2024, the Town’s web page devoted to this topic (“Annex Reimagined”) makes no mention of user fees.  Those fees were also absent from a Town mass mailing sent to citizens last month.

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Question:  Didn’t the Town just finish expanding its tax-financed indoor gym space?

Answer:  Yes and no.  As part of the expansion of the existing Vienna Community Center, finished in September 2017, that existing Community Center now hosts the following indoor exercise opportunities, per the Town of Vienna website.

• full-size, high school-regulation basketball court with six hoops
• volleyball courts
• three pickleball courts
• single-lane track circling the court
• additional basketball court with two hoops
• two pickleball courts
• volleyball courts

(The duplications are verbatim, from the Town’s website, because the Town tracks its facilities separately for each of the sub-sections of the Community Center complex.)

But that expanded collection of indoor exercise opportunities has gaps, relative to how people use indoor exercise space:  Pool and weights.  The main new indoor exercise opportunities that this proposed new facility would add are indoor swimming and weight-lifting (resistance training).

So the Town is, in effect, adding to the variety and overall size of the indoor recreation spaces that it offers, using a new building, located about 1000′ from the existing one.

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Question:  Is this proposed new facility part of the Vienna Parks Master Plan?

Answer:  No, Vienna does not yet have a Parks Master Plan.  That should be delivered Spring 2025.  That’s what it says on the website.  (Reference.)

That said, I judge that the presence or absence of a Town Parks Master Plan has no practical importance here.  FWIW.

With regard to starting Vienna down this path, just months before the forthcoming Parks Master Plan, do not be alarmed, as Vienna routinely works by the ready-fire-aim method.  Likely, if Town Council OKs starting down this path, … then the forthcoming master plan will, indeed, tell you that your plan was always to go down this path.  And thus you may claim, going forward, that you have no choice but to continue down this path.  Because it’s in the Parks Master Plan.  (This may seem Kafka-esque, to some, perhaps even Machiavellian,  Perhaps Orwellian?)  But in the TOV, it’s just the way some things are done.  Sometimes.

At the minimum, right now there is no Town of Vienna Parks master plan, and until one is approved, Town Council can do as it pleases in this area.

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Question:  Why raise the meals tax for a decade?

Answer:  Vienna already has taken on about as much debt as it can finance under current tax rates.  To take on the roughly $26M-ish in additional debt this new building would require, they need to raise taxes to be able to cover all the interest and principal payments on total Town debt.

Vienna is pledged to use the meals tax for debt service, and the presence of that stable, dedicated tax base is one of the factors allowing the Town to borrow cheaply.  So sayeth the Town. But, the historically large Town of Vienna 2020 bond issue effectively used up all the available meals tax money. 

As things stood after the 2020 bond issue, with no new tax revenues, the Town would have been unable to take on significant new debt until it paid down a considerable fraction of existing debt.  This is why the Town has told the citizens that the options are to raise the meals tax now, or wait a decade.  A decade being the time it would take to pay down, in essence, a chunk of that big 2020 bond issue, and prior bond issues.

A second factor, not mentioned by the Town, is that Virginia law was recently amended to make it much easier to raise meals taxes.  It is widely anticipated that Fairfax County will impose a meals tax soon (reference).  (Prior law required Fairfax to have a referendum on the issue, and voters consistently voted “no” to a meals tax in Fairfax County.)  The anticipated Fairfax County meals tax will raise diners’ costs outside of the Town of Vienna, and so will reduce the anti-competitive aspects of increasing diners’ costs within the Town of Vienna.

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Extras for Experts 1:  Did the People of Vienna really ask for a $1000/year membership indoor gym and small indoor pool?  That seems like a pretty specific ask, if you ask me.

Answer:  Not as such.  And digging any deeper below that would require a lot of effort, and likely require the cooperation of the Town.

Last year, the Town widely advertised the presence of an on-line survey regarding possible uses of this Annex property, with an emphasis on recreational uses.  They got more than 1000 responses, mostly (but not entirely) residents of the Town of Vienna.

Reading through the contractor’s report, it’s clear that there was significant interest in an exercise- or sports-related use, in the respondent population, as it responded to this survey, as structured.  (For example, “sell the land” was not, I think, offered as an explicit option on the survey.  My write-in vote was for a community fallout shelter, but I suspect that was not given serious consideration.)

Beyond that, I don’t find a lot of clarity in the contractor’s report, so I suspect that there was some degree of “discussion and interpretation” of the results, before arriving at a final summary.  Just as an example, at least some charts make it appear that pickleball courts were the single most-preferred option.  So in some sense, as compiled by the contractor, an indoor pool edged out pickleball courts.

Source:  From the Town of Vienna Website, “Annex Reimagined“, Use study final report.

My only conclusion is that “this is exactly what The People want” is Not Warranted by the Data presently available.  This proposed pool/gym is probably among the things that people might have wanted, assuming no consideration was given to the cost (or user fees).  But it’s not as if Town residents voted on a list of options, and a small-scale REC Center at the proposed annual user fee beat the two or three other feasible options on the ballot.

In summary:  Yes, a significant number of people said “pool”, in some form.  No, it’s not clear what they had in mind.  Nor that they gave any consideration to the $1K/year user fee.  And pool seems to have edged out, of all things, pickleball courts.

 

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Extras for Experts 2:  What do we already have for pools and gyms in the Vienna VA area?

1:  Fairfax County REC Centers

Fairfax County runs three very large REC Centers near the Town of Vienna.  These all have a big indoor pool, weight room, and various other exercise-related amenities (e.g., basketball court, exercise classroom, … ).  An annual family membership with access to all those facilities runs about $1050.  (There are additional fees for some services, such as golf, or renting the handball courts by the hour.)

A further difference between the REC Centers and the proposed Vienna facility is that the REC Centers are fully self-supporting (in the sense that, by statute, user fees must cover operating costs).  By contrast, annual operating costs for the Vienna facility will be covered in part by general tax revenues.

Finally, as a long-time user, I will attest that these Fairfax-run facilities are really nice places to work out.  (Though, as befits a public facility, not luxury.  No towel service here.)  They are not just competitors to a Vienna facility, they are attractive competitors. 

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Sub-question:  Why does the presence of the nearby Fairfax County REC Centers matter?

Answer: 

1)  It means that Town Council was shown a lowball estimate of the ongoing taxpayer cost of running this facility.  That, because the contractor’s revenue projections for a Vienna pool/gym assumed there was no competition in the Vienna area.

2) The three nearby government-run pool/gym fitness centers weaken any argument that there is a strong need for similar, and similarly-priced, Vienna facility. 

3) To the extent that the new Vienna pool/gym cannibalizes membership from the three nearby Fairfax County REC Centers, that raises the average cost per user, for government-sponsored exercise in this area, with no  additional exercise achieved.

The proposed Vienna facility is essentially identical to a Fairfax REC Center, charging about what Fairfax charges now (for access to to the entire REC Center network), but with a gym/pool that’s about a third the size of the typical Fairfax REC Center.  (In fact, for non-Town residents, the proposed fee to use the Vienna facility is higher than that charged for the REC Centers.)

Viewed purely as “a place to exercise”, it should be clear that these facilities share the same customer base.  (And that, to some extent, these facilities are vying for the same customer base as the numerous private gyms and pools in this area.)

The first implication of the three nearby REC Centers is that we are in no sense “under-served”.  Anyone who wanted to join a government run gym/pool, similar to the proposed Vienna facility, for about the same price as the Vienna facility, just a short drive away, has had the opportunity to do so for decades now. (E.g, the Oakmont REC Center was built in 1988).

But, as then-Council Member Kelleher pointed out ten years ago, the small size of the Vienna facility means it will have a higher cost per user than the Fairfax REC Centers.  To the extent that the Vienna facility draws members away from the REC Centers, all that does is raise the average cost of publicly-sponsored indoor exercise in the area.

Finally, as I laid out in my original post in this series, the Town was shown financial projections based on there being literally no other government gyms in the area.  Ignoring the copious amounts of competition for the local exercise dollar means that the Town was shown the rosiest possible scenario for the likely ongoing tax-paid financial deficit for this facility.   The estimates put in front of Town Council likely significantly understate taxpayer liabilities to keep this gym/pool running in the future, because they ignore all local competition for the gym/pool dollar.

It’s actually quite a bit worse than that bland statement.

First, the consultants propose annual membership fees for non-Town-residents that are about 20% higher than the current REC Center fees.  And yet, they projected that half the members for this new facility will come from outside of the Town of Vienna.  This half includes individuals who live closer to a REC Center than they will to the proposed Vienna facility.  So, embedded in the consultant’s cost estimates is an assumption that some significant fraction of community residents will drive farther, and pay more, to use the Vienna facility instead of the larger Fairfax REC Centers.

Second, if you follow through the logic of the “economies of scale:” point raised by Council Member Kelleher, back in 2014, you eventually realize that Vienna does not have the option to recover its costs through fees alone.  This will be a taxpayer-subsidized facility for as long as it operates.

• • Fairfax County REC Centers will cost less to operate, per user, than the Vienna facility, owing to the much larger scale of the REC Center facilities.
  • Fairfax sets its membership rates to cover its costs.
  • Practically speaking, Vienna really won’t have the option to charge significantly more than the nearby Fairfax REC Centers.
  • And so, logically, the proposed Vienna facility’s membership rates are effectively capped below the level of costs it will incur.  Vienna will never be able to charge enough to cover the operating costs of this facility, given the presence of three very large County facilities nearby, priced at their lower per-member cost.
    

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2:  Local swim clubs (private membership outdoor pools).

 

I count four private membership pools as being in, or in the neighborhood of, Vienna VA, as shown above.  Combined membership is 2450 families or so, but that’s out of a population larger than just the (roughly) 5200 households in the Town of Vienna.  (And it’s not clear where the boundary is — apparently a fair number of Town of Vienna residents belong to the Mosby Woods pool.)   All of these local private pools are physically larger than the 5,500 square foot indoor pool that has been proposed for Vienna.

These swim clubs turn out to be odd relics of a bygone era.   They aren’t for-profit businesses.  They are organized as non-profit tax-exempt social clubs, per IRS regulations.  This allows them to skate through certain tax and zoning regulations, and so allows them to locate and remain in the local neighborhoods (on land zoned for residential use), where no for-profit business would be allowed to exist.

But the downside of that form of organization is that these swim clubs are more-or-less “frozen” in the state in which they existed when they were formed in the 1960s.  They can’t even raise their prices enough to clear the waiting lists (below).  (Because?  They are non-profits.  Why are they all nonprofits?  Because if they weren’t, they couldn’t be there (zoning).

As shown above, they have a combined waiting list of about 2,200 names. Extent of duplication across lists is unknown.  But suspected to be high.

The marketplace will never make those waiting lists materially shorter.  That’s gist of my prior analysis of this topic.  At today’s land prices and with local land mostly built out, it is unlikely that any new community membership pool could be formed.  (Plus, there hasn’t been a new one built in this area in more than a half-century.)  And, as noted in prior posts, as not-for-profits, and tax exempt, all the existing pools would gain, for any attempt to accommodate additional membership, is heartache.

Most of our community private membership pools (swim clubs) started up on the era of desegregation.  That’s not germane to how they currently operate.  But it’s undeniably true, as a historical fact.  (For reference, Lake Fairfax (then privately owned) was desegregated via lawsuit in 1965.)

More than anything else, the long waiting lists for Vienna-area private membership outdoor pools (swim clubs) show that there is demand for membership in an outdoor private pool, at around $1K/family/year.  Ish.  What I would characterize as a “predominantly fun” pool. (As opposed to a “predominantly exercise” pool typically found in a gym.)  Whether that would translate to demand for membership in a small indoor pool, or to any type of government-run (public) pool, I have no clue.

Finally, in the context of these local swim clubs, I’ll restate my observation that that pools meant for exercise are just different beasts from pools meant for fun.  Not that my pool, and most pools, don’t accommodate some of both.  Swim team practices, adult lap swimming, and so on, coexist with unstructured play time.  But the primary focus of these outdoor pools — and the majority of the pool time and area of these private pools — seems to be “open swim” periods, which means kids just messing around and having fun at the pool.

By contrast, here’s the actual pool schedule for the pool at the Oakmont REC Center.  It should be evident from the daily schedule that “open swim” (kids playing around) is constrained to a tiny fraction of total pool surface/time available.

The lesson here is that all big rectangular pools can accommodate both exercise and play.  The key to understanding what kind of pool you are getting is to pin down the fraction of pool time and area devoted to “open swim”, versus the fraction devoted to “lap”-related/”class”-related activities.  The graphic above does that nicely, as area of the graphic represents pool surface area x time available.  You can see that the “open swim” block accounts for maybe 5 percent of the total pool/area available at Oakmont.  To be clear, to say that a pool will have some “open swim” time in no sense guarantees that it will be a “fun-centered” pool,  Oakmont REC Center has “open swim”, but it is overwhelming a pool used for serious, scheduled exercise.

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3  there are many for-profit gyms in this area.

You can’t ignore the presence of a lot of for-profit gyms in the Vienna area.  For sure, some part of the potential demand for a Vienna gym/pool ought to come from those who currently have for-profit gym memberships.  But I can’t even guess what the impact would be.

The first issue is the unknown overlap of the market segments for for-profit and publicly-run gyms.  For-profit gyms cover a wide range of facilities, targeting different market segments, and offering different levels of amenities.  Some of them have pools.  Most have weights, unless strictly cardio-oriented.  Unlike a publicly-run gym, for-profit gyms are under no mandate to be a one-size-fits-all or something-for-everyone exercise opportunity.

The second issue with assessing the interaction between local for-profits and the proposed government-run Vienna gym/pool is the family-friendly/kid friendly thing.  The for-profit gyms I’ve joined in the past did not strike me as particularly kid-friendly.  (Further, my recollection is that some of them have a strong “singles” flavor, with all that implies.  Not that I would know anything about that personally.  But that’s the opposite of the family-friendly vibe that the Town of Vienna is aiming for.)

Nobody will be able to tell you where the local for-profit gyms fit in, for the assessment of a proposed Vienna public pool/gym.  But I can at least benchmark a price or two, to see how they compare to the proposed $1K/year family membership for the Vienna pool.

Here’s one that looks nice, Evolution,  in downtown Vienna.  It has weight machines and cardio machines.  Looks exactly like the type of facility I used all my adult life.  A year’s membership for my wife and me would cost about $1300 ($55 x 12 x 2). Or maybe 25% more than the County REC Center membership, for a less comprehensive but much closer facility.

Good enough.  I’m guessing that the local for-profit gyms are priced in the neighborhood of what the Vienna pool/gym would cost.  And that they are a reasonably close substitute for the government-run Vienna gym, for some types of users.  Beyond that, I don’t think you can say much.

For-profit gyms are a mixed bunch.  Always have been.  So are the people who use them.  Not much more to say than that.

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Extras for Experts 4:  Could you fit an Olympic-sized outdoor pool on the Town of Vienna “Annex” (former Faith Baptist Church) property?

Answer, yeah, sure looks like you could. 

An Olympic-sized pool is about a third of an acre of water surface.  Put that way, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be able to squeeze one — with all the other associated stuff it needs — onto a three-acre lot.

I made the table and crude graphic above by scaling up the dimensions of Vienna Aquatic Club layout.  They have a pool that’s about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool.  I.e., double the pool size means double the parking, double the size of the locker rooms, etc.

You’d need to build a parking garage alongside it, if you wanted to put a pool this big on three acres.  Crudely put, that’s because your car is bigger than you are.  So if the pool is full of people, that’s going to correspond to an area much larger than the pool, full of parked cars.  Based on Vienna Aquatic Club, a one-third-acre olympic-sized pool is going to need to park about 200 cars to handle peak-period open-swim demand (e.g., a hot Saturday afternoon), or about an acre-and-a-third of parking.  Which means you have to start stacking those cars up in a garage, if you want to fit everything onto a three-acre plot.  Or else have little land left over for (e.g.) the pool deck or surround.

And if you ran it like the local private pools — unlimited member access during peak use periods — you’d only be able to sell about 900 family memberships, tops, to an outdoor olympic-sized pool.  That reflects the capacity of the pool, for unconstrained peak-period use.

Operating cost is an open question.  Whether or not the Town could run an outdoor pool that size for for $0.5M/year (the Vienna Aquatic membership fee, scaled up) is unknown.  If so, the memberships would cost about what a Vienna Aquatic Club family membership costs — call it $600.  At this level of precision, let me call that not intrinsically different from the membership prices in the Town’s proposal.

As a public provider, the Town would almost certainly have to offer (e.g.) single-day passes and such.  Some other ways to buy pool access, other than annual membership.  So I’m hazy on how the crowd control would work at peak periods.)

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Extras for Experts 5:  Some possible justifications for a taxpayer-financed public gym in Vienna.

The Town’s presentation materials are not exactly clear on why this proposed pool/gym is a justifiable use of tax dollars, both to build and to run, other than some general feel-good issues around exercise and community.

Sub-question 1:  Does providing a public gym increase the amount of exercise undertaken by well-to-do adults?

Answer:  No.  Not for a wealthy population with ample existing exercise opportunities.

There’s a fairly large scholarly literature on this topic.  I cannot claim to have read it all, but my impression of what I read is the following:

For a poverty population, or for children with limited exercise opportunities, providing free exercise opportunities, in an area with few existing ways to exercise, does, typically, increase the amount of exercise by that poverty population.  (And so, humanitarian issues aside, for a population with a high incidence of taxpayer-financed or -subsidized health care coverage, there is an argument to be made that it’s cheaper to build gyms than hospitals.)

Researchers use the term “fitness desert” to describe high-poverty areas lacking fitness or exercise facilities.  Opening new, free, facilities in a fitness desert does lead to greater total amounts of exercise. 

By contrast, the impact of free public gyms, on middle-class adults with significant existing exercise opportunities, is rarely the subject of research, and when it is, typically finds impacts that are too small to be reliably measured (no “statistically significant” difference).

The bottom line is that the well-to-do, in an area with many opportunities to exercise, will exercise.  The presence or absence of some particular exercise opportunity has at best a minor influence on the amount of exercise achieved.

Source:  CDC

In other words, to a close approximation, given the high incomes of the Vienna-area population, and the ample existing opportunities for exercise, as I read the scholarly literature on this, most of what a proposed Vienna pool/gym will do is substitute exercise in this facility, for exercise that would have occurred elsewhere.

My take on the research literature on this topic matches my experience.  I’m old enough to have used the Bally’s Gym located underneath the Tyson’s Corner mall, and the one at Loehman’s Plaza.  For a while I used a little gym located right on Church Street in Vienna.  All of those went out of business, and somehow I managed to find a place to exercise anyway.  Once I discovered the County REC Centers, I never looked back.  But if those REC Centers did not exist, I’d find another way to exercise. 

More informally, you know who has a strong interest in a Vienna pool?  Families that swim a lot now.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the likely heavy users of a Vienna facility, in the future, are those who exercise regularly now.

Sub-question 2:  Does building a pay-for-use public gym in an urban area lead to better health outcomes for the population.

No.  Or at least, no hard evidence.  See above.  Even for the poverty populations where free publicly-provided exercise venues increase the level of exercise, there appear to be no (or, at least, few) studies that go on to measure the impact on the health of the affected population (e.g., reduction in heart attacks per capita, lower prevalence of diabetes, and so on.)

For sure, exercise is associated with better health outcomes.  So there’s an assumption that you’ve increase the health status of the population.  But any impact that public facilities have, on the average level of exercise in the population, and then on to the health of the population, gets too tenuous to be observed in typical studies of this issue, over the typical time frame studied.

This may be more a case of “absence of evidence, not evidence of absence”.  But there’s no hard evidence for it, in either case.

Sub-question 3:  Is there a market for a public facility focusing on specialty or under-served populations?

Here I’m thinking both of specialty classes (parent-child classes, gentle exercise programs for the elderly), as well as the small low-income population living in the Vienna area.

The idea that the Town of Vienna would make a major effort to attract and serve a low-income population is simply not credible.   So I don’t think one could appeal to “low-income underserved” as a principal rationale for operating a public gym/pool.

And, while most for-profit gyms are oriented toward reasonably fit young and middle-aged adults, we do have private and non-profit gyms in the area offering specialty classes for the elderly and for children.

Several local gyms offer elderly-oriented classes.  (E.g., Lifetime Fitness, YMCA, Zumba Gold in various local facilities, and so on).  So the idea that the elderly can only obtain structured exercise in government-provided facilities is not true.  There appear to be numerous for-profit and non-profit entities that offer elder exercise classes in this area, assuming you can pay the fees.  Further, there are local Vienna gyms specializing in fitness for kids, including little kids (e.g., My Gym, Vienna.)

Sub-question 4:  What about the “sense of community” argument.

Finally, if there’s no clear objective reason for building a small, tax-subsidized REC-Center-like facility in Vienna, the argument in favor can always be made in terms of “sense of community” and civic pride.

I don’t think there’s any objective way to argue for or against such an argument.  So far, despite some searching, I have yet to come across any type of hard evidence that this is a material benefit of public gyms in high-income areas.  But it may be all-but-impossible to quantify “sense of community”, and so to measure it.

Can’t rule it out.  Can’t prove that it happens, either.

Realistically, the Town can make the argument that, value aside, it’ll be pretty neat to have our own pool, and it likely won’t cost enough that people will notice.  And, unfortunately, that seems to be the gist of what I’ve read.  The cost of construction will require adding a penny to the cost of a dollar’s worth of restaurant meal.  (And, not discussed, may crowd out other capital projects for the next decade or two, as all the current debt gets paid down.)

The Town isn’t talking about the likely annual operating losses (as opposed to those one-time construction costs), to be covered in perpetuity by the taxpayers.  But, as someone who as pored over the Town budget from time to time, I am sure that the Town’s bookkeeping system will guarantee that nobody will ever be able to determine the true level of annual losses for this facility, once this is up and running.  The Town will take this function of government — pool/gym complex — and commingle its costs and revenues with the rest of the Parks and Rec budget.  After which, nobody outside of Town government will have a clue how much it costs to keep this facility running.  It’ll just be part of the overall Parks and Rec budget.

In Fairfax County, by contrast, they maintain a separate fund for the REC Centers, and for the Reston Community Center (which has a pool).  That way, Fairfax has a reasonably clean set of accounts for those facilities, and can check to see that the REC Centers in fact cover their own operating costs.   (You can also see that the  roughly 5,000 square foot pool in Reston only covers about 40% of operating costs.)

That level of clarify of local government bookkeeping, by Fairfax County, seems laudable to me, but it would never happen in Vienna.  It would require both that Town Council would want that information to be publicly known, for purposes of accountability of elected officials, and would have the foresight to direct that the Town’s books be set up so that costs and revenues for this facility were kept in a separate fund, as Fairfax does for the REC Centers.  The likelihood of both those things happening, at the same time, is, in my opinion, effectively zero.

The upshot is that, whatever it costs to run this proposed center, going forward, we’ll pay it, and we’ll have no clue how much it is.

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Addendum:  Summary of prior posts on this topic.

There’s a lot of research behind this FAQ, shown in prior posts.  This addendum lists those, and narrates how this evolved as I read through the materials posted with the Town’s 9/30/2024 Town Council Work Session.

• Post 2037, where I was floored to see that the Town’s consultant’s estimates for likely pool users ignored the presence of any local competition, most notably, the three County REC Centers.  My plea in that post is that if the Town wants to know likely use for this new facility, it should at least survey Town residents and ask them a realistic survey question (are you likely to buy $1K/year family membership for the facility as-proposed, are you likely to buy $12/day passes, and so on.)  Vienna should spend $1K on a survey to get that information before committing to spending $26M.
• Post 2038, where I did some simple benchmarks for the Town’s consultant’s projections of revenue, and found that, sure enough, they were much higher than you would guess, based on (e.g.) Fairfax County REC Center revenue per square foot of facility.
• Post 2039, where I was frankly pissed off that the Town sent out an “informational” post card that encouraged residents to let the Town Council know how much they liked this idea, but didn’t mention the ~$1000/year user fee that Vienna residents would have to pay.  This, while the very first page, of the very first document, in the materials shown to Town Council, in the 9/30/2024 Town Council Work session (link here), listed those user fees.  (Only later did I note that, in addition, there is no mention of user fees on the Town’s web page on the Annex.  In both cases, Town staff made it appear as if the only financial issue is another penny on the meals tax.)
• Post 2042, where I summarized the information I could find on our other local public pools in this area.  That’s the point at which I found out that the similarly-sized pool in Reston only covers about 40% of its operating costs.  (Which, I only later found out, is in agreement with 2014 Council Member Kelleher’s statement that a Vienna pool — to be roughly the same size as the Reston pool — would be inefficiently small.)
  
• Post 2043, Post 2044, where I found out that the proposed pool is quite small.  At heart, these two posts are just the same calculation, done two ways.  The upshot is that the consultant’s revenue projections assume what appears to me to be a ridiculously high density of annual contracts, per square foot of pool, relative to what our local private membership pools allow. There is no mention in the consultant’s materials (that I noticed) that pool size might limit the number of memberships that could be sold.
  
• In Post 2045, I stumbled across local newspaper reporting from a decade ago, and found out that the 2014 Town Council was aware of all the big picture issues that I’d spent the last week figuring out.  But that the 2024 Town Council had not been briefed in the reasons for the 2014 “no” decision on a Vienna municipal pool.
  
• Post 2046, I got a lot of surprises when I looked at the local swim clubs, but I finally figured out why we (and all of the DC area) has such ridiculously long waiting lists for those membership pools.  Basically, those swim clubs are non-profits, and most are relics of the desegregation era.  And they ain’t making any more of them.
  
• And, finally, this post is where I put it all in one place, in one reasonably coherent story.

 

In this post, I explain why you are unable to buy a private pool membership in Vienna VA.  In the sense that, if you got an urge to buy one today, the best you could do is put your name on a waiting list for one.  And wait a few years.

There is a clear answer to this question, but there is no short, simple answer.  These pools exist at the intersection of tax law, zoning law, and land ownership.

Walk through the points in red below, step by step, to work through the logic of the answer.

Details follow.

Continue reading Post #2046: The market (?) for swim club memberships around Vienna, VA.

 

I lied about returning to more normal topics.

That’s because today, I found out that Vienna Town Council already knew all the main points I’ve made in these past few posts, about a proposed municipal pool.

The 2014 Town Council.

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to to repeat it.

George Santayana

Source:  Article by Brian Trompeter, from 2014 insidenova.com

A decade ago, Vienna was getting ready for a $15M-ish expansion of its community center.  (Roughly, I forget the exact total.)

At that time, Vienna Town Council turned down the idea of a pool at the Vienna Community Center, due to the cost.

And, hilariously enough, most of what I’ve done with these recent pool-oriented posts is re-discover what Town Council figured out for themselves a decade ago.  Here’s the rest of the Brian Trompeter reporting of the 2014 pool discussion (emphasis mine):

Source:  Op cit.

For that 2014 discussion, the then-Town Council was already aware of the three nearby REC Centers.  And they noted that Vienna’s facility would be at an inefficient scale (higher cost per member) than the REC Centers, owing to economies of scale and the large size of the Fairfax County facilities.  With the icing on the cake being the then-Mayor’s unwillingness to handcuff future Town Councils with the high debt load a municipal pool would entail.

Crikey.  Turns out, all I’ve done is replicate the thinking of the 2014 Vienna Town Council. 

The idea of a Vienna municipal pool came up a decade ago, with the expansion of the community center, and got shot down for huge debt load (Mayor), ample local supply/competition for this product (Polychrones), and insufficient scale for an efficient Vienna facility relative to County facilities (Kelleher).

In reading the materials for the 9/30/2024 Town Council work session (to the extent I cared to, and then some), I came across no discussion of the earlier decision, or the reasoning.

Anyway, I was unaware of the rationale for the 2014 “no”.  I’m … surprised?  unsurprised?  … that it dovetails with what I’ve been pointing out, about the current proposal.

Starting with the three nearby Fairfax County REC Centers.

Not a sponsor.

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Conclusion:  It’s deja Vienna all over again.

How to put this?  Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been watching a re-run …

… but maybe this time it’ll have a different ending?

Yeah, turns out, that’s pretty much the gist of the Vienna Town Council decision-making.

The only real point is that the 2014 Vienna Town Council shot down the last Vienna Pool proposal based on more-or-less exactly the problems I’ve pointed out with the current proposal.

I guess it’s on me to figure that out.  And I was unaware of it, until Google showed me that ten-year old newspaper coverage.

I should subscribe.

It’s validating, really. To find that I’ve repeated, from scratch, what Town Council figured out ten years ago.

In part, it validates that I’ve just wasted a lot of time.

But it also validates that the same basic “business” problems with the 2024 proposal were highlighted front-and-center on the 2014 proposed community center pool.

And so, coming from a mixed government and business background, I hope you can see what drives me crazy about Town of Vienna decision-making.  This entire discussion should have started with the 2014 Town Council decision, the rationale for that, and how this new proposal addresses the concerns raised back in 2014.  Explain what is different now, or, at the minimum, dispute those prior objections. 

Next up:  The weird market for private pool memberships, starting with discussion of the table at the top of this post.