Pool project moving forward for town

By Nikki Jamieson
Vauxhall Advance
njamieson@tabertimes.com

By next summer, Vauxhallites will be able to relax at the side of their brand new community pool.

On the Oct. 6 council meeting, Vauxhall town council signed a contract between the town of Vauxhall and Western Recreation, to build a new pool for the town.

Vauxhall has been without a pool for the past three years, with the closest, usable pool being half an hour away in Taber. The plan for the new pool features a whirlpool, a kid zone, a three-lane track with a deep end and a slide. The only thing they are not planning on replacing would be the pool’s boiler.

“It helps with a little bit with that, what I was talking about, those incidentals, when things go wrong and that,” said Plumtree. “When I found out that, yeah, all the piping is being changed, well that’s one less thing that could go wrong and cause us extra expense, because we’re replacing it all.”

The old pool in Vauxhall had a problem with leaks from 20 years, needed serious upgrades to its filtration system in order to abide by Alberta health regulations and had to close because staff couldn’t keep the chemical levels, such as chlorine, in the pool at safe levels. But, due to grandfather clauses, the town had to choose between doing a major renovation on their existing pool’s structure, or tearing it out and building a new one.

A group of volunteers, Vauxhall Friends of the Pool Society, has raised over $500,000 of their $1,000,000 goal in order to provide funding for the new pool. The Town of Vauxhall is offering tax receipts for those who donated.

The Pool Society is also apart of a vote-in contest on http://www.avivacommunityfund.org that runs until Oct. 23. If the society wins, it could provide an additional $100,000 towards the pool.
Any money raised will have to be for building the pool itself, and not for added features like the vortex ($15,000), beach-entry water features ($10,000) and a slide ($75,000). Those features can be fundraised for after the pool is built, but can still go in, albeit covered and missing a part until paid for.

“All those can be put in at any time that we have the money,” said Plumtree. “We’re quite comfortable with that, once we found out it can be built up to that certain point, and just added later.”

“We can have the water slide, but if we don’t get the pool built without the water slide, we won’t be able to use the pool,” said Vauxhall councillor Martin Kondor.

Construction on building the new pool will begin on Oct. 15, with a planned completion date of July 2016.

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