kids

Editor’s note: This is one of several Lincoln Squirrel articles about an agenda item (a “warrant piece,” with apologies to Leo Tolstoy) to be considered at the March 23 Town Meeting.

By Alice Waugh

The Parks and Recreation Commission is asking for $182,000 to rebuild Codman Community Pool’s tot pool, which is leaking underground and no longer meets handicapped requirements.

If Town Meeting warrant article 15 is approved, the town will appropriate a total of $976,950 for 11 Community Preservation Committee (CPC) requests, including the wading pool project. The CPC is charged with allocating funds that are collected from a 3 percent surcharge on real estate tax bills as mandated by the Community Preservation Act (CPA), which was approved by town residents in 2002. CPA funds can be used for expenditures related to open space, preservation of historic structures, community housing (defined as low to moderate income housing), and recreation.

During the last few summers, pool operators have noticed worsening water loss from the tot pool and have shut off the filters at night to save water, requiring them to chemically rebalance the water each morning, said Dan Pereira, Director of Parks and Recreation.

Last year, the Parks and Recreation Commission got a contractor quote of about $25,000 to repair the pool, but in spring 2012, Americans with Disabilities Act codes changed, so now the town can’t do any work on the tot pool without replacing the entire structure. The pool now has a short step into the 15-inch-deep water, but new codes call for a “zero-entry pool shell, so people can essentially roll right into the pool if they want to,” as they would at a sandy beach, Pereira told the Board of Selectmen in December 2012.

The ADA change “removed out ability to just fix what was broken,” because a new code-compliant tot pool on the same footprint could now have only half the usable area it currently does, Pereira said. The Parks and Recreation Commission subsequently got quotes of $130,000 to replace the wading pool on its current footprint or $145,000 to replace it with one twice as big.

A preliminary design calls for a figure-eight-shaped pool, with half for wading and the other half with sprinklers and other play features commonly seen in public parks. The total price tag including contingency would be about $183,000. The new features would make the wading pool “a little more appealing and up to date,” which might have the added benefit of attracting slightly older children who now crowd into the shallow portion of the main pool, Pereira said.

The price tag is “a larger number than we expected when we started out, but essentially it’s a brand-new pool that’s double the size of what we have now,” Pereira said.

The main Codman Pool opened in 1974. Twelve years ago, the main pool got new decking and filter lines for $250,000, and a Codman Trust grant two years ago funded a $45,000 PVC liner to stop serious leakage, Pereira said.  The tot pool was added sometime in the mid-1980s and has never been renovated.