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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 for the pool-related spending of residents of the Town of Vienna proper.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Noted in previous posts, Fairfax County financial data show that the Reston Community Center pool covers about 35% of direct operating costs. (Google reference for .pdf of relevant Fairfax budget document.) And, that pool was just about 5000 square feet in water area, prior to recent renovations that added a further 1700 square feet. (Per this reference.)
The full arithmetic, with page references, is the following: Pull up Fairfax Budget Fund 40050 (Google link, .pdf). Reston aquatic center currently runs at a 65% operating loss. (Calculated as $425K in aquatics revenues (page 205), versus $1,212K in direct costs (page 198.)
So the proposed Town of Vienna pool is about the same size as the Reston Community Pool.
The Reston facility received about 20,000 person-visits to their pool in their most recent fiscal year (per Fairfax Budget Fund 40050, reference given above). Which, if they had received $10 per person-visit, would have yielded about $200K in revenues. The actual revenues for aquatics were listed at around $400K. Against (what I assume is a narrowly-defined) direct cost of about $1M.
The Town’s projected operating budget for our facility, with a similar-sized pool, is more like $2M. Everybody seems to think the pool is the big draw, for memberships. But if our visits and revenues, for a pool this size, match those in Reston … taxpayers are going to take a beating.
I guess when I saw that the Vienna plan was for a 30,000 square foot building, I figured that the pool would be the majority of that. Being as how “pool” is how Town staff appear to be selling this. But instead of the pool surface area being about half the square footage of the building — as with the Reston facility — the new Vienna pool/gym is going to about 18% pool.
I didn’t expect that.
So the plan for the Vienna municipal pool/gym is to have a fairly large building, with a small pool. If built to that scale, it can’t handle a lot of pool memberships. And if we get about the same level of business as Reston, with a pool about that size, but our costs are $2M a year …
Yeah, the taxpayers are going to take a beating.
Anyway, I didn’t think that this facility, sold almost entirely on the basis of people mentioning “pool” in an open-ended questionnaire, is going to have a small pool as part of the overall 30,000 square foot building.
I really didn’t expect that.
The sole point of this post is to present some information on what other government-sponsored pools in the Vienna, VA area charge, and whether or not they break even doing that. Continue reading Post #2042: Local indoor public pools.
As our Town Council works up the nerve to OK the single largest expense in Town of Vienna history, I thought it might be a good time to repost this.
In a nutshell, adjusting for inflation, over the past 60 years:
Post #1820: Dribs and drabs of Town of Vienna historical data.
And, I guess it’s worth saying, pretty much everything we pay the Town to do for us would already be included in taxes paid to Fairfax County. The sole exception is, I think, trash service. The Town may do it nicer, or better, or something. But if Vienna ceased to exist, Fairfax County would still maintain the roads, pipes, police and fire service, and so on, for the taxes that we all already pay to Fairfax.
From this perspective, to make the single largest capital investment in TOV history, to produce something that’s all-but-indistinguishable from a Fairfax County rec center, right down to the annual fee to use it … I guess that’s not unexpected.
Edit: Now that I re-read that, I’m not sure it’s the largest in Town history. I didn’t literally check, memory fades. And when you get right down to it, you need to CPI-adjust everything.
But memory fades, and costs are often pieced out across multiple fiscal years.
But surely, of recent projects (police station, expanded community center, and now this), surely, once I start talking about the expected annual operating loss, then at that point, this building and all it entails surely dwarfs the other two, CPI or no CPI.
If the interest rate is 5%, the value of a perpetuity is 20x the annual payment. If I take (what I see as the grossly optimistic) assumption of the Town’s consultant, of a mere $500K annual loss, a commitment to pay those losses in perpetuity is worth $10M now. (And accordingly, if the real annual loss is more like $1M, that’s about like then town shelling out an extra $20M now.)
It’s a big decision. Let’s leave it at that.
The decision to buy into the government-run gym market appears to me to be, right now, the single largest purchase the Town ever makes. For a long time, anyways.
So in theory, it needs that level of due diligence.
If nothing else, I’d like to see the Town Council put together a local panel of experts, meaning, representatives of nearby local governments that already run municipal pool/gyms (a.k.a. rec centers). Then ask them discuss two topics: Annual operating cost, and annual operating revenue, from running one (or more) of these pool/gym/rec-center things.
Heck, that could be interesting.
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.
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.
