City starts planning for new swimming pool

Faced with the prospect of losing Iqaluit’s popular, but badly aging, Astro Hill swimming pool in 2007, Iqaluit city council voted last week to start planning for the expensive job of building a new one.

To that end, council will establish a six-member “new aquatic centre committee,” reporting to the city’s recreation committee. Its job will be to work on programming for the proposed new pool and to prepare for a possible referendum among ratepayers to approve the borrowing of money needed to pay for it.

Ian Fremantle, the city’s chief administrative officer, said the city’s newly-signed lease with Nunastar, the owners of the Astro Hill complex, expires March 31, 2007.

After that date, Nunastar will likely have other plans for the space, Fremantle said, pointing out that the last round of negotiations with Nunastar were “extremely difficult.”

“Two years from now, we may not have a swimming pool,” Fremantle said.

David St. Louis, the city’s director of recreation, said the 30-year-old Astro Hill pool suffers from numerous mechanical and maintenance problems.

“Increasing problems are due to the age of the filtration system, an outdated disinfection system, sauna elements, leaking pipe, aging pumps, and inadequate drainage on the decks and change room floors,” St. Louis said in a written presentation to city council last week.

At 18.5 metres in length and nine metres in width, the current pool, with a maximum capacity of only 35 people, is too small.

“It has become a regular occurrence for people to be turned away when capacity has been reached,” St. Louis said.

He is proposing a new “aquatic centre” that would hold a 25-metre pool with a water-slide, a “swirl pool,” and other features.

The city’s biggest problem, however, will be to figure out how to pay for it, when to build it, and whether or not a new pool could be built more cheaply by including it within a larger complex that could also house a badly-needed new city hall, or an arts and culture centre.

In his presentation, St. Louis provided city councillors with a rough idea of what a new pool might cost – about $8 million.

One to way to find that money might be to get $2 million of it from fundraising or territorial and federal government grants, and to borrow the other $6 million.

A new pool would cost more to operate, especially if it’s built with borrowed money. The city now pays about $180,000 a year to Nunastar in lease payments. But a new pool could create an extra $480,000 a year in borrowing costs, and an extra $200,000 a year in operating costs.

All that could hit the pocketbooks of Iqaluit ratepayers, who already complain that their property taxes are too high.

According to some rough calculations that St. Louis provided to council, the city might have to raise taxes by about 5 mills, which could add at least $450 to $550 a year – or more – to homeowners’ tax bills.

A proposed project schedule would have the new committee develop a budget by March of this year, and a referendum on borrowing by October.

Even then, a new Iqaluit swimming pool might not be open until 2009, leaving open the possibility that the community could go without a pool for at least two years.