$600,000 to provide a comfortable swimming environment

April 14, 2008

Swimming Pool Government Waste This story is a little more local than most of our pork reports, but it still warrants a heads up.

Maggie Thurber has discovered an amazing abuse of tax dollars in the City of Toledo. Apparently,Toledo is gearing up to spend a whopping $600,000 to open several pool locations.

As Maggie points out, the City is taking the nanny state approach by deciding the costs are not relevant when it comes to providing comfort for citizens.

Kattie Bond, director of Toledo’s department of neighborhoods, said the benefit of operating city pools outweighs the cost.

“It is important to provide recreational opportunities for citizens,” Ms. Bond said. “We live in a city where we do get hot weather, so it’s important we provide a place for kids to at least get wet and cool off.”

Maggie also tosses in some pretty convincing numbers that lead to the conclusion this $600,000 project will only serve less than 2% of the population.

Last year, the pools served 25,151 entrants. The city did not keep track of how many of those ‘entrants’ were the same individual. They also charged $1 for entry.

In 2007, there were six pools open (one was a splash pad) compared to the 12 facilities opened in 2006. Despite the increased attendance at two of the pools, overall attendance at the six facilities declined 18.5% from 30,841 to 25,151. This clearly indicates that individuals who had access to a pool in 2006 did not travel to other locations in 2007 in order to “get wet and cool off.” (I just can’t imagine how they survived!)

As these numbers are visits and not visitors, it’s hard to estimate just how important this cost is to the general public. For sake of argument, let’s estimate that individuals likely to use the pool facilities will do so five times during the season. This seems a reasonable estimate considering the number of days the pools are open.

Using this assumption, the pools had about 5,000 unique visitors. The 2006 Census data shows that there are 74,896 children (under 18 years of age) in Toledo. Even if every visitor to the pools was a child, we would be serving less than 7% of the kids in the city. If we consider total population, those estimated 5,000 unique visitors represent less than 2% of the population.

Lovely, isn’t it?

Posted by Eric Odom | Filed Under State Blogs