Pasayten's Methow Valley Bulletin Board

Actually, the only comparable project going on that I was able to find was in the small city of Piedmont, CA:

https://piedmont.ca.gov/government/proj ... unity_pool

https://tphnews.com/19760/news/inflatio ... shortfall/

Piedmont is a city of about 10,000 people fully enclosed by Oakland. It is a VERY wealthy community (at one time it was one of the richest cities in the United States). This project is a much larger facility, though it is mostly an outdoor pool (which makes sense for the Bay Area, because you can easily use it all year even if it is outdoors). There was a $19 million bond issue associated with the pool, which apparently is not enough and so now they are attempting to raise money to make up the difference.

I stumbled across this in doing some research on what it costs to build a new swimming pool. What I found is that very few new public swimming pools are being constructed in the United States, and even the newest pools in a lot of areas are forty to fifty years old (many are more like seventy or eighty years old). I think why that is the case is rather complicated and not easily understood -- at least part of it was because the last great public pool building surge was largely subsidized (at the federal level) by 1960s-era Great Society programs. There have been no equivalent programs at that scale in recent decades.

Honestly, the described pool was a very large ask even for a community of that size and wealth.

I am by no means an expert in public finance or municipal bonds, but it is reasonable to assume that bonds for an indoor aquatic center in the Methow Valley would have little value in the market. It's hard to see that investors would be fooled by the basic facts, making bond sales that much more difficult.

Bonds are a pretty conservative instrument. An indoor aquatic center in the Methow Valley is a big, risky ask. It is by no means a conservative proposition.

Our population base is small. The prospective number of users is smaller still. Revenue capture for operations is marginal at best. On top of that, the area is older and poorer than state and national averages, suggesting that willingness to vote for capital or operating levies is not a selling point. Marketing municipal bonds for an indoor aquatic center in the Methow Valley is not going to get a very good interest rate. Add more dollars to the proposal. Pretty soon you just start circling the drain.

All of which circles back to a core question of whether the proposal is right for our community. It is simply hard to understand how to make the financials work for a publicly-supported indoor aquatic center in the Methow Valley.

It is best that this proposal be put to rest and the community moves on with something more appropriate.

Steve Oulman

Could this happen with the Proposition 1 Methow Aquatics District for the proposed mega pool complex???

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/h ... s-a30a54f0