Wednesday, February 19 2014 at Juanita Starbucks Attendees: Sara Baquero-Garcia, Jennifer Dotson, Tyson Wellock
I - Introductions
II - Vision & Mission
We shared our vision & mission:
Vision:
We envision a public pool within the geographic area of
the Riverview School District where children can play, the high school could
host a swim team, people of all ages and abilities can develop and grow their
aquatic skills and fitness, and the community can come together to enjoy the
water as a part of family life year-round.
We envision a local (not regional) facility owned by the City of Duvall or the Riverview School District and operated by a nonprofit like Wave Aquatics or the YMCA that opens by 2023.
Mission:
We will plan, acquire funding for, and develop a public aquatics facility within the geographic area of the Riverview School District to serve the competitive sports and recreational needs of residents of all abilities and ages.
Right now, here is a map of how far people have to travel from Duvall to get to either a pool or a public beach. People have to drive at least 25 minutes each way. If there's any traffic on Novelty Hill or the Woodinville-Duvall Road, this number can easily be higher. Duvall & Carnation are the only incorporated cities in King County that require more than a 15 minute drive to swimming.
III - Where we are now
· Sara Baquero-Garcia attended 3 farmers markets this summer & fall.
· Sara attended the City Council meeting on September 26th to introduce herself.
· Sara attended a Riverview School District meeting to introduce the project.
· We started http://duvallpool.blogspot.com to start centralizing info.
· DIVES had our 1st team meeting November 16th and has met monthly since.
· Several team members have started investigating business models of both local pools and pools in areas with similar populations. Initially, it looks like it is necessary for a community to have at least 10,000 people to even consider a pool. The city limits of Duvall currently has a little over 7,000 but the immediate area around Duvall has about 15,000 so we may be approaching critical mass. Certainly within 10 years the population should be able to sustain a pool.
· Mari researched documents from previous failed pool attempts around Duvall and Carnation, including the Eastman Rush pool.
· We introduced ourselves to the Duvall City Planner, who was on the Board of Directors for the Monroe YMCA development of their pool. The idea of a community pool is now in the Duvall Comprehensive Plan and will be included in the discussion when the City dives into recreation planning this summer.
· We have started researching nonprofit status requirements and we hope to attain nonprofit status by September 1, 2014.
IV- Our next steps
1. Acquire 501(c)3 status. We will need to start raising approximately $1000 to cover the legal,
accounting, and filing fees.
2. Start fundraising to understand & develop
community support.3. After our initial review of broad business models, we need to start investigating the next level of business models to see if we can find one that could work. This will ultimately require a feasibility study, although there is some research we can do before commissioning a professional report.
3. Are there opportunities for us to volunteer with Wave’s current projects?
VI - Comments from Tyson:
1. When the St. Edwards Pool was hungry for a steady revenue source, they partnered with a synchronized swimming team. While this did provide the expected revenue, it cannibalized so much pool time that the opportunity cost of other lost revenue exceed the benefit.
2. From an operations standpoint, swimming lessons is the single best generator of revenue.
3. Deriving operations costs from a potential future Parks Department is risky as funding can be cut off in economic slumps. However, they consistently set aside parks department funds into a maintenance pool. Then, when a new roof or other predictable operations costs emerge, they draw from that pool.
4. To support a swim team, a 6 lane pool is required.
5. A 6 lane 25 yard pre-fabricated pool generally runs about $500,000. A seasonal bubble for a pool of that size generally runs about $1M. A facility this size would require less than an acre for a building, but over an acre for parking. Expect to require at least 2.5 acres for a small facility.
6. A swim team needs starting platforms & one end of the pool to be 7' or 8' deep for liability reasons.
7. Diving boards of any kind add a huge cost to liability insurance.
8. To support a swim team, swimming lessons, and recreational use, a 6x25 pool probably would not suffice. Possibly an L-shaped pool would work, but during swim meets, it could be hard to do lessons & free swim in one half of the L.
9. When looking at building an economic model, Wave Aquatics considers 3%-5% of the general population as potential users of a pool. However, they work with the Lake Washington School District, who only have 25% of households with children in school. 75% of households have zero children in K-12. Duvall's demographics may be different than Kirkland, although we don't have data on that. Looking at 3% - 5% of 15,000 people around Duvall, that would translate to 450 to 750 people interested in using a pool at some point during the year.
10. At the Redmond & Juanita Pools, they require 100 kids in swim lessons every month to break even. In the summer, they have hundreds of kids.
11. In addition to the Bellevue Aquatics Feasibility Study we have already gone through, he mentioned that some other municipalities have also conducted feasibility studies in the past decade, including Redmond, Kirkland, and Bothell.
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