Interim borough manager Alekka Fullerton is closing the pool two weeks earlier than was originally planned this year citing cost overruns.
According to a Monday email, Fullerton said she decided to close the pool by May 15 to avoid having to bring a budget amendment — that is, asking for more money to cover costs — to the assembly.
Fullerton primarily blamed payroll overruns because pool manager Jae McDermaid had to cover for several open positions.
“We did not have an [assistant manager] for a long time so the Manager has been working overtime, and we have lost lifeguards so the Manager has been working overtime lifeguarding, etc.” Fullerton wrote in her email.
Additionally, the pool’s sand filter is broken and McDermaid has to vacuum out the pool by hand each day.
McDermaid said last year, during the June closure, the sand was replaced in the pool’s filter and while that was being done, a piece of PVC pipe in the bottom of the tank got broken which means sand gets pushed back through and into the pool whenever staff backwash the filter – a part of regular maintenance.
“It’s not hurting anyone and it’s not dangerous,” she wrote. “It just looks bad. And it needs to be fixed.”
Regarding cost overruns on payroll, McDermaid said it’s the nature of her position that she has to fill in often.
“The borough doesn’t quite understand that most aquatic facilities (all of them besides ours) have an aquatic director, maintenance staff, training director/head lifeguard,” McDermaid wrote in an email. “This facility has me.”
She said she’s been discussing the option of a salary with the borough for years, through multiple managers.
“It has either been brushed aside or shut down,” she wrote. “In the future, I hope they realize having a salary paid manager would eliminate the issue of going over payroll due to overtime.”
Fullerton has proposed a budget for next year that has the pool open for 10 months instead of 11. If that portion of the budget is adopted without change, the pool would be closed in July and again next June, bringing the 2025 closure to two-and-a-half months.
“The reason we do it in the summer — it’s sort of counterintuitive — lots of people think people go to the pool in the summer, but they just don’t. People want to be outside in the summer,” Fullerton said. “We’ll have days when nobody will show up.”
Fullerton said she arrived at a 10-month pool schedule proposal while seeking to balance next year’s budget.
“We tried to make an educated guess on when it would hurt the least, by doing it in the summer when the swim team — which is the largest user – is not using it,” she said. “Really, a pool is a luxury for such a small town. It’s great and I love that we have it, but it’s expensive.”
Haines Dolphins Swim Team board president Lee Robinson said he’s sympathetic to the idea that it’s expensive to keep the pool open.
“It’s a hard one because I’m also critical of spending. I’d like to see cuts,” he said.
But, he pointed out that the pool’s lack of consistent hours over the past five years has decimated the swim team and the program has been trying to rebuild for years.
In 2019, the pool closed in June for what was supposed to be a few months of renovation, but instead was plagued with delays and back-and-forths with a contractor that extended that closure for seven months. But that opening was short-lived as the pool closed again for most of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resignation of the pool manager. The assembly again proposed a three month pool closure in 2021 which drew pushback from residents.
In 2022, former borough manager Annette Kreitzer said it cost about $27,000 a month on average to keep the pool open, but it’s not clear if and how that figure has changed. Borough finance director Jila Stuart said the pool’s budget for this year is $330,209. Currently, it has spent about 85% of its budget in the first 9 months of the fiscal year – July through March.
“This does not include February and March invoices which are still rolling in, such as some utilities and credit card charges,” Stuart wrote in an email. “That means we have less than $50,507 to pay April [through] June expenses for the pool.”
Last year’s April through June expenses were $75,899, she wrote.
In a March 29 letter to the Parks and Recreation advisory committee, Robinson wrote that the swim team averages nearly 55 swimmers per year, while the learning-to-swim programs often have 15-20 swimmers. Funding comes from a variety of sources, including swimmer fees, grants, and fundraisers, he wrote.
All of that back-and-forth and disruption in the pool schedule contributed to the Chapell family’s decision to move to Juneau during longtime Haines Dolphins swimmer Lucia Chapell’s junior and senior years.
“That was a big part of it,” Chapell said. “I found good consistency in Juneau for swimming.”
Now, as the family prepares to move back to Haines, Chapell said she’s faced with a tough choice. The 18-year-old senior has committed to swimming at Colorado College and is questioning whether she can afford to lose two months of swim training.
“It just doesn’t quite work out for me if I’m in a place that doesn’t have a pool and I’m not able to swim for months,” she said.
Chapell, whose specialities are backstroke and butterfly, said she already spent a year traveling to find pools to train in during 2019.
“People suggested ‘oh just swim in the ocean,’” she said. “That really doesn’t work out for the kind of swimming I’m doing.”
Now, she’s considering staying in Juneau and working there for the summer before leaving for college in the fall.
“It’s definitely not my first choice. I want to be in my home,” she said.
Setting aside the frustration of spending a summer apart from her youngest child, Sara Chapell questioned the idea that Fullerton and other managers have put forward – that traffic at the pool dips during the summer.
“I think it depends on the summer we have,” Sara Chapell said. “When it’s a rainy summer, the pool is pretty popular. It’s one of two municipal facilities, borough facilities, where kids are free to go hang out in the summertime. A lot of parents rely on the pool to give their kids something safe and healthy to do which isn’t roaming the streets.”
In 2019, then-Parks and Recreation Committee chair Burl Sheldon did an independent cost-benefit analysis using borough data from the previous three years and found that 77 percent of pool usage takes place September through April while 23 percent happened May through August.
But that type of analysis was not readily available for post-pandemic years and pool manager Jae McDermaid did not return a phone call or email seeking more information about pool usage as of press time.
Ultimately, Sara Chapell said the pool’s 11-month schedule was a compromise and she doesn’t support moving to a 10-month schedule.
Both Chapells said they think of the pool as crucial in a coastal town where water safety education should be a priority – and they think of it as a community gathering space.
“I lifeguard at the pool, so I spend a lot of time just watching everyone who comes in and out,” Lucia Chapell said. “It’s essential for a lot of people. I know a lot of the elderly folks that come in, it’s their only safe and reliable form of exercise that they get. If you’re injured it’s a good tool for that. Kids and their families are constantly coming in. A lot of different people love the pool and I think it’s really important to let our communities leaders know that and fight for this really important resource.”
During his report to the Haines Borough assembly on Tuesday, Mayor Tom Morphet said he was going to seek nominees for a pool board.
“The pool is the one borough facility that has no citizen oversight and as more and more pressure is put on the pool at this time, I think it’s appropriate that we appoint a citizen committee to help out things there,” he said.