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.
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.
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.
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.
