Should South County Help Pay for a Pool in Port Townsend?
The city of Port Townsend is seeking to have a new public swimming pool built, citing deficiencies and maintenance costs of the current YMCA Mountain View pool. The new pool is proposed to be built on the city’s Mountain View commons area at a cost currently estimated at $37.1M. This is the low end of the range initially provided by consultants hired by the city, which ran as high as $53.7M, as reported by the Port Townsend Leader in May 2023.
Why is this relevant to south county residents? Port Townsend does not have the capital funds required for the project. It is proposing creative ways to generate the funds at the expense of Jefferson County residents who live outside of city limits. The city council is looking at two options to fund the pool, or perhaps a mix of those options.
A first option would be a real estate tax levied on property within a public pool district that includes most areas of the county North of Highway 104, including Port Towsend, Cape George (which already has its own pool), Hadlock, Chimacum, Irondale, Marrowstone, Gardiner, Kala Point, and Port Ludlow (which already has several pools of its own). The second option would be a sales tax increase levied on sales transactions throughout Jefferson County – including Quilcene, Brinnon, and even the West end of the County along the Pacific Coast.
The logic of these options is somewhat puzzling, given that the YMCA’s records, as reported by the Port Townsend Free Press in August 2023, show that during 2022 only 174 Port Townsend residents and 34 county residents from outside the city limits used the existing pool on an average monthly basis. Yet the Port Townsend city council evidently feels it is fair to ask distant County residents to pay for the construction of a pool within city limits. And then to also ask those same citizens who might theoretically actually use the pool, despite the travel time, distance, and expense, to pay for that privilege at an annual user cost estimated at approximately $1,000.
Either of these funding options would require approval by our County Commissioners and then be passed to the public for a vote. Consideration of these funding mechanisms has been initially championed by Commissioner Kate Dean, who represents District 1 (Port Townsend).
At a recent traveling public meeting of Jefferson County officials held in Quilcene on September 14, the other two County Commissioners were asked by Quilcene resident Marcia Kelbon for their positions on the pool funding proposals. District 2 Commissioner Heidi Eisenhour stated that she was skeptical of the proposed pool, as she had been talking to District 2 constituents and many felt a new pool should be at HJ Carroll Park in Port Hadlock rather than Port Townsend. Our District 3 Commissioner Greg Brotherton stated that he was also skeptical of the pool, but then noted that it would be nice to have a world-class pool in the area, and that he had previously taken his daughter to existing pools in Port Townsend and Port Angeles despite the travel distance. Commissioner Brotherton then said that while sales taxes were generally considered very regressive, the County Commissioners thought sales taxes were in fact progressive because visitors to the County paid into sales taxes. So, while both Commissioners expressed skepticism, neither appeared to strongly oppose the project.
The Port Townsend Free Press is holding a Town Hall on the Port Townsend pool proposals at the Quilcene Community Center on Thursday, October 19th at 6:00 pm to gauge local sentiment on the project and proposed funding options and may hold an additional town hall in Brinnon. Local residents are encouraged to share their thoughts at these meetings.
Another local wrinkle on the pool issue concerns whether the pool is an infrastructure project that Port Townsend should prioritize given other needs, one of which potentially impacts South County. Some Port Towsend residents have expressed the view that repair of the city’s decrepit roads and of the dam on Lords Lake in Quilcene that provides the city’s water should take priority. The Lords Lake dam was assessed by the State Department of Ecology in 2016, and by consultants hired by the Port Townsend Paper Corporation in 2019, to be at risk of instability under seismic demands. These evaluations found liquefiable layers in the dam, which could result in downstream flow failures in the event of a quake. It is not difficult to speculate that such a sudden release of water from the lake could cause serious damage to downstream Quilcene area residences and infrastructure. It would be ironic that, after piping water from the Quilcene area for decades, with water consumption constraints being placed on Quilcene residents who have put in wells in recent years, the City’s inaction on upgrading the dam could result in giving local water flow back with a vengeance.