Author: chogan@directresearch.com

My analysis of the proposed Vienna municipal pool/gym has no particular plan.  I just read through the same documents that were provided to Vienna Town Council a month ago.  And see what I see.

So forgive the somewhat rambling nature of this.

But, now that I’ve finally read through page 10 of the last of the Town’s 9/30/2024 documents — (well, the last that I’m willing to read — the Kimmel et all document, on this Granicus page. )

I find that, in fact, much of what I have posted here, in reading through all these document, in order, was spot-on.

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Yes, the financials for the proposed pool/gym were done under the assumption that we’re the only public pool in the market area, clearly contrary to fact.

First, to clear the air, the Contractor’s materials eventually do say that their estimate of likely demand is based on an area with no existing public pool.

So, from the get-go, given the three excellent FxCo REC Centers within 10, 12, and 14 minutes drive of the proposed Vienna facility, the estimates of demand are undoubtedly optimistic, if for the omission of that stiff local competition alone.  Which means the estimates of annual operating deficit are also optimistic.

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They expect to sell 4000 annual memberships to a 5,500 square foot pool?

The other finding is that the proposed pool is small.  Real small.  Water area 5500 square feet, or only about 18% of the total building area.

And yet, the projected annual enrollment in the Vienna pool/gym is far more than the enrollment in all the private pools in and around Vienna, combined.  The Town’s contractors plausible annual enrollment, at the high end, is 1.63 times total private pool enrollment in the Vienna area, for a pool that is just 0.14 (14%) of the combined size of those private pools.

And in addition, the estimated 2000 memberships from Vienna proper, above, from the Town’s 9/30/2024 materials, means that, depending on the level of duplication in the current waiting list names, the Town’s contractor kind of expects the Town pool to attract somewhere between 100% and 200% of all (!) the people currently on private-pool waiting lists in the immediate vicinity, to sign up for the new Vienna municipal pool.   And then, on top of that, another couple thousand memberships from outside of Vienna proper, even though Vienna proposes to charge those folks more than the cost of a Fairfax REC Center membership.

That’s 11 times the density of annual contracts, per square foot of water, as our local outdoor private pools will allow themselves.  (And, as a one-time user of one of those pools, those low caps on contract/square foot ratios are for good reason.  Even at that, my pool was crowded during peak periods.)

(And that 11x figure doesn’t even include the daily walk-ins.)

For sure, unlike those local private entities, ain’t no way everybody’s getting in the pool all at once.  More prosaically, whatever this tiny pool turns out to be, if they meet their sales goals, I’m pretty sure the experience is going to be nothing like our local outdoor pools.

Meanwhile, for our proposed government-run 5,500 square-foot pool, surely we should look to the experience of our nearby government-run 5,000 square foot pool, at the Reston Community Center, run by Fairfax County. 

The Smith aquatic center.  If nothing else, we have reasonably clean information on financial performance of that small pool via Fairfax County budget fund 40050.  Among other things, that’s how I know the Reston pool only covers 40% of (what appears to be a narrow definition of) annual direct costs.

And that the Reston pool gets roughly 20,000 person-visits per year.  (Plus some other types of business, which look like maybe pool rentals).  But the core 20,000/year is (/365) about 55 people a day, or (assuming an hour visit each, open 12 hours a day) about 4 people an hour.  While there’s no obvious direct conversion factor, I perceive a big difference between an average pool user flow of 4/hour (Reston), and a projected (as-much-as) 4000 annual contracts (Vienna).  (And I note that Reston charges about half of what Vienna proposes to charge, see prior post.)

That’s a big discrepancy, for publicly-run pools of about the same size, one in actuality (Reston), one a contractor’s scenario for a proposed Vienna facility.  With the two pools being very nearly the same size.

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Conclusion:  An old friend, Rosy Scenario

As I stated in an earlier post, for the Town of Vienna, this has all the earmarks of a done deal.  So, in some sense, it doesn’t really matter if the underlying narrative being used to sell this has — to put it nicely — some serious flaws.

And it’s hardly worth pointing it out, because if the contractors “fix” the revenue numbers — downward — I’d bet serious money that they’ll simply adjust the costs downward by the same amount, to leave the same net result.  And if that sounds just a bit too cynical, just watch and see what happens. We saw that before, for Town=hired consultant support for MAC zoning.

And if you look at the whole story of how we got here, you have to start with the basic story being tainted from the outset.  When people responded “pool” on an open-ended survey, my guess is that they didn’t quite envision what’s being proposed here.  Starting from the $1K/year price tag for a family membership.  And now including the small pool size, the astounding proposed density of contract holders/pool square foot (compared to local private pools), and what is shaping up to be a far-larger-than-projected annual operating deficit, due to our old friend, well-known in the DC area, Rosy Scenario.

We aren’t even having a discussion about (e.g.) appropriate role of government.  Nothing so basic.

We the people, apparently, want a pool.  So we have been told.  So, we’re going to get a pool.  This pool. With 4000 annual memberships, and 5,500 square feet of water surface, and a $1K/year annual membership fee, and so on.

And, based on the site plan, 100 parking spots, for 4000 annual memberships, for pool and gym users.  Where my local private membership pool has about 100 parking spots, for 450 annual memberships, pool only.  That discrepancy is in line with the contracts/pool square foot, but I’m just having a hard time getting my mind around the gulf between those two.

Who am I going to believe, the contractor, or my own lying eyes?

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one in the Town of Vienna that, I don’t know, reads the details and gives it some thought.  Instead of just nodding my head.

I react to much of Town of Vienna decision-making as I do to an embedded splinter.  It’ll just fester if I don’t get it out.

But now, with this post, I’ve gotten it out of my system.  By finally plowing through the last contractor-provided document, I feel as if I’ve removed the splinter.

The decision-making process here still looks just god-awful to me.  But at least, with respect to the most glaring inconsistencies, I’ve gotten this off my chest.

Nobody will ever thank me for pointing these things out.  So I guess blogging is its own reward.

We now return to our regularly scheduled content.

 

The bottom line on this post is, are you kidding?

I set out to see how many names, total, were on all the waiting lists of our local membership-only pools.  (Of which, my family is a member of Vienna Aquatic Club).

Answer:  Nearly 2200 names.  There’s no barrier to signing up for multiple waiting lists, so how many unique families that is, I don’t know.  Also unknown is whether they’d have an interest in an indoor Vienna government-run pool.  But there are 2200 or so families, some likely duplicated across lists, on local area membership pool waiting lists.  Families that appear prepared to spend $1K a year or so on a pool membership.

Which seems like good news, if you’re talking about building a new pool.

But the sleeper statistic is in the right-hand column above.  There, I have taken the water surface area of each local club’s main outdoor pool (or in the case of Dunn Loring, pools), and compared it to the total membership.

All of our local membership pools have a limited number of memberships.  All of those pools work out to be around 16 square feet of main pool space, per membership.  (Water surface area, excluding baby pools and such.)

And that’s because of pool capacity constraints.  (And, likely, parking.)  But my main point being that you can’t cram but so many bodies into the pool at once.

I can attest for Vienna Aquatic Club, the main pool gets very crowded at peak times.  Really crowded.  So I think that, in terms of drop-in-any-time, swim-when-you-want pools, all of our local pools have calibrated membership size and pool size just about right, to handle the summertime demand peaks.  Barely.

The lesson I’m taking from this is that the revealed capacity limit of our local outdoor pools is one membership for every 16 square feet of pool water surface area.

Now turn to the proposed Town of Vienna municipal pool:

Source:  Town of Vienna Schematic Design Document, for the 9/30/2024 work session of the Town Council, on this Granicus page.

Do the arithmetic:  5500/16 = ~340.

Turns out, the plan isn’t for Vienna to have a municipal pool.  It’s for Vienna to have a small municipal pool.  Really, almost a tiny municipal pool.  And if I take that 5500 square foot pool, and use 16 square feet per family membership as the capacity limit that appears to be a common denominator for local private pools, then that proposed Town of Vienna pool is big enough to accept … 340 family memberships.

Are you kidding me?  Did I slip a decimal place somewhere?

I’m not even going to get into the financials here, except to say, that’s a train wreck.  Unless people are really keen to spend money on a gym-only (no pool) memberships to this new facility, if pool memberships are limited by pool size for this municipal pool, as they are for all the private pools in the area, the Town can’t sell anywhere near enough memberships to cover the cost of this.  Not even close.

Maybe somebody can say they have some clever way around this.  And that because fill-in-the-blank-here, the Town can sell vastly more memberships per pool square foot than local private pools can.

But, at first blush, this proposed Vienna municipal pool is much too small a) to make much of a dent in pent-up demand for pool memberships, and b) to be anywhere near economically viable.

Alternatively, maybe the Vienna municipal pool will never be the sort of pool where you send the kids to cool off on a hot day.  Because if everybody does that — it’s just like the private-sector pools in the area.

So, at a minimum, if there is a plausible financial plan lurking somewhere in the background here, it’s for a pool whose operation is vastly different from our local private pools.  And one that somehow manages to sell a lot more memberships per square foot than our local private pools do.

In the Town’s materials, I didn’t see any mention of the size of the pool setting any sort of constraint on annual memberships sold.

So I just … have no idea.

Summary

Today’s surprise is that the proposed pool is quite small.  If it were one of the local private pools, it could have no more than 340 family memberships, due to crowding during peak use periods.

How many the Town is hoping to sell, for a 5500 square foot pool, I have no clue.

Anyway, good news is, there’s a lot of unmet demand for membership in private outdoor swimming pools, in the Vienna area.

Bad news is, I have no clue what the Town thinks is going to happen, after it builds a pool this small, with projected operating costs that high.  Other than taxpayers take a beating.  Which, increasingly, appears to be in the cards.

I’m not sure I want to look into this any further.

Addendum:  The money-losing Reston community pool.

Noted in previous posts, Fairfax County financial data show that the Reston Community Center pool covers about 40% of direct operating costs.  (Google reference for .pdf of relevant Fairfax budget document.)  And, that pool was just about 5000 square feet in water area, prior to recent renovations that added a further 1700 square feet.  (Per this reference.)

So the proposed Town of Vienna pool is about the same size as the Reston Community Pool.  (For whatever reason, the overall pool/gym building for Vienna is about twice the square footage of the Reston facility.

The Reston facility received about 20,000 person-visits to their pool in their most recent fiscal year (per Fairfax Budget Fund 40050, reference given above).  Which, if they had received $10 per person-visit, would have yielded about $200K in revenues. The actual revenues for aquatics were listed at around $400K.  Against (what I assume is a narrowly-defined) direct cost of about $1M.

The Town’s projected operating budget for our facility, with a similar-sized pool, is more like $2M.  Everybody seems to think the pool is the big draw, for memberships.  But if our visits and revenues, for a pool this size, match those in Reston … taxpayers are going to take a beating.

I guess when I saw that the Vienna plan was for a 30,000 square foot building, I figured that the pool would be the majority of that.  Being as how “pool” is how Town staff appear to be selling this.  But instead of the pool surface area being about half the square footage of the building — as with the Reston facility — the new Vienna pool/gym is going to about 18% pool.

I didn’t expect that.

So the plan for the Vienna municipal pool/gym is to have a fairly large building, with a small pool. If built to that scale, it can’t handle a lot of pool memberships. And if we get about the same level of business as Reston, with a pool about that size, but our costs are $2M a year …

Yeah, the taxpayers are going to take a beating.

Anyway, I didn’t think that this facility, sold almost entirely on the basis of people mentioning “pool” in an open-ended questionnaire, is going to have a small pool as part of the overall 30,000 square foot building.

I really didn’t expect that.

 

I should preface this by saying that, for a decade, I held job in the U.S. legislative branch that required me to use strictly neutral language in any official publications I wrote.

In that job, in order to indicate that an outcome was uncertain, I was forbidden from saying “X may result in Y“.  That statement, as written, is not neutral.  It seems to imply that X will result in Y.  Instead, I was, without exception, required to use “X may or may not result in Y“, as the only properly neutral way to convey the uncertainty of that relationship.  Without exception.

So maybe I’m a little sensitive to tax-financed propaganda.

But, in fact, the Town does this all the time.  They certainly did for the now-repealed MAC zoning.  And, if you go back and look at the archives, at some point, the Town newsletter morphed from being a source of information, to being the official house organ of Town government, reflecting its point of view.

Again, paid for by our taxes.

And so it goes.

The deep irony is that the Town routinely runs four or more months behind, on publishing minutes from its official meetings.  So if you actually want to know what’s been said, officially, so far, as a citizen, you’re shit-out-of-luck, unless you feel like spending an hour paying close attention to the video recordings of recent Town Council work sessions.

But the same Town government that can’t get minutes of its official meetings published in less than half a year can somehow manage to get a slickly-produced mass mailing, with every appearance of attempting to drum up support for a municipal pool, done in a perfectly timely fashion.

Anyway, if by magic, today’s mail brought me the following postcard. In addition to a beautiful artist’s conception of the facility on the front, it has this wording on the back, emphasis mine:

There’s no way for me to read this as anything other than advocacy.  “If you  like this, please let Town Council know.” (Separately:  Describing this as Town Council’s proposal is also, I think, objectively incorrect.  Use of citizen “wish list” was annoying in its gratuitous evocation of positive feelings.

Or, in my case, evocation of the Sears Roebuck catalog.

This in no way reflects on the merits or lack of merits of Town staff’s proposal for a municipal pool.  I’ve addressed the revenue projections from that in the just prior posts.  And, for sure, none of the advocates seems to stress that this will be a $1,000-a-year family membership pool/gym, similar to but with less comprehensive facilities than the many Fairfax County rec centers in this area.

In fact, if you read that postcard, it sure reads as if a temporary (not stated:  10-year-long) increase in the meals tax will pay for everything.  But that’s misleading.  Somehow the Town staff did not mention their consultant’s proposed schedule of fees, which, no surprise, looks pretty much like the fees that Fairfax County charges to use its similar (but larger) facilities.

Anyway, if you’re going to set yourself up running a taxpayer-financed business — which is what we’re talking about here — you need to approach it as a business decision.  Not as something for which Town staff advocacy is normalized.

Conclusion.

Again, this is neither here nor there, with regard to the wisdom of the decision.

I’m just pointing out that when I worked for a government entity, if I’d manage to do what Town staff just did — use tax dollars to produce a public-directed bit of advocacy — I’d have been fired, no questions asked.

But in the TOV, this is just business as usual.  We’re so used to it that I’d bet nobody in the Town power structure even gave this use of tax dollars, to sway Town Council opinion, a second thought.

 

The Town of Vienna is considering building a municipal pool/weight room, at an initial cost of around $32M, including the purchase price of the land it sits on.  The projected ongoing annual cost to the taxpayer appears to be in the neighborhood of $500K.  Ish.  But that’s net of a projected annual revenue of about $1.7M.

This new facility would provide people in the area an opportunity to purchase a roughly $1,000/year family membership, or pay (say) $10/head/visit.

And yet, everyone in this locality already has that opportunity.  Except for the location, the smaller size, and the more limited facilities, this proposal from the Town of Vienna appears to be not much different from the existing Fairfax County Rec centers in this area.

But, near as I can tell, the Town’s analysis ignores the existing government-run gyms in the area.  Above, left, is the view of the market area that was delivered to Town Council this past September.  Above right, I’ve added in the three nearest Fairfax County rec centers.

I will again state that these County rec centers are very nice facilities.  The Oakmont rec center is, by far, the nicest gym that my wife and I have ever used.  Our local Fairfax County rec centers offer a broader range of activities than the Town can offer in this location, up to (e.g.) golf courses.

Other than location, the only unique aspect that I saw for the Town’s proposal is that it leans toward having a “fun” indoor pool (= child oriented), as opposed to the more serious (= exercise-centric) indoor pools found at the County rec centers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone in Vienna who wanted to pay $1K/year for a family membership to a government-run gym and indoor pool has long had the opportunity to do so.  That fee gives your family access to a set of rec centers that is top-notch, and offers a broader array of facilities than than the Town can offer.

This would suggest that any projection of revenues, from the Town’s pool, ought to be done conservatively.

Seems like a good place to start, then, with a realistic project of likely Town of Vienna revenues, is with those Fairfax County rec centers.

I thought I should do a straight-up projection of likely revenue, based on what Fairfax County has experienced with its similar, but better, rec centers.

In effect, these are the revenues to be expected if the Town is able to sell its government-run pool/gym to its own citizens (only!), to the same extent that Fairfax County is able to sell its rec center services, to its citizens.

Here’s how the two compare.

All I’ve done is taken the observed Fairfax County rec center revenues per Fairfax County resident, and boosted them for the higher average incomes in Vienna.

Alternative simple estimate: revenue per square foot.  An alternative way to get at a similar estimate is simply to take rec center revenues per square foot, for the county, and multiply by the proposed square footage of the Vienna municipal pool facility.   Like so:

Again, the result is nowhere near the Town’s projected revenues.  Edit:  In hindsight, I screwed that up, the revenue number should be more like $22M, and the resulting revenue per square foot more like $750K.  Still a long way from the projected $1.7M for the 30,000 square foot proposed Vienna pool/gym.

Finally, there is limited public information available for Herdon, a nearby Virginia Town with a larger, but less affluent population.  Herndon maintains a pool/gym, indoor tennis courts, a golf course, and other amenities.

In total, Herndon’s Parks and Recreation revenues — from a roughly 60% larger citizen population, and a far broader array of offered services — was $1.8M, per their most recent Comprehensive Financial report (2023 report, Exhibit A2).  I get the vague impression that most of that revenue came from the golf course, but I was unable to pin it down any further.  (Edit 10/26/2024:  Upon reading Herndon’s budget, that must be wrong.  They maintain distinct funds for their Golf Course and their cemetary.  So figures pertaining to golf course costs and revenue should not appear on (what I hope was) an analysis of Herndon’s general government fund.)

In any case, this again suggests that the Town’s estimate of revenues, for the proposed municipal pool, is optimistic.  Presumably, all it would take is a phone call, from Town of Vienna to Town of Herndon, to get the actual annual revenues from Herndon’s municipal pool.  (Edit:  If such a figure exists, e.g., if Herndon has a way of tracking specifically revenue for use of the pool/gym facility)

Will our Town Council do that much due diligence before proceeding further?

Maybe they already have, but there’s no easy way to know.  At the current rate, it looks like the Town Council might get around to publishing the minutes from its most recent work sessions sometime this coming spring.  (Thus, staying within the letter of the law, while keeping the citizens in the dark to the greatest extent possible.)  Once the Town gets around to that, Edit: if they haven’t already voted to fund the pool, once they’ve voted to fund the pool, as this looks increasingly like a done deal to me, then maybe I’ll read those to try to find that out whether they bothered to ask Herndon about its revenues, from its municipal pool.  My guess is we’ll never see that, from the Town, unless the answer is favorable to the “yes” decision to build our own government-run pool and weight room.

 

 

I had a friend ask about the new pool.  Against my better judgment, I decided to try to get the facts straight, about a proposed Town of Vienna municipal pool and weight room.

I didn’t get very far.  But if you read nothing else, pause to consider the two maps below.

Edit 10/24/2024:  What a sheep I am sometimes.  I fell right into this one.  Just copyin’ the slides.

The price tag above  excludes the purchase price for the property (the land), and the cost of demolition of the then-existing structures. The issue at hand is the amount the Town now needs to borrow, but if you’re reckoning the total cost, you need to add in the cost of the land and prep, call it another $6M.

Full disclosure:  My family belongs to one of the private membership pools in Vienna.  We also use the Fairfax County rec centers, which come with pools.  Neither of one influences my thinking, but both give me some perspective, I think.

 

Continue reading Post #2037: Wading into the Town of Vienna pool.