Swim center now more challenge than attraction

There are countless good reasons for people to come to this community. The Columbus Aquatic Center, in its first couple of years, has not been one of them.

That's causing the Consolidated Government some headaches, not to mention some money woes. The swim center, funded with Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax money and opened in 2013, cost $10.6 million to build. Until January, it was costing the city $655,800 to pay a private business to operate it -- badly.

The city-contracted management company, USA Pools, ran the facility so ineptly that City Manager Isaiah Hugley called the problems "a matter of public health and public safety." (The health department had temporarily shut down the pools for improper chlorine levels.) An audit also showed non-compliance with American Red Cross standards; uncertified lifeguards and even lifeguard instructors, many of whom did not have basic first aid/CPR training; lack of any marketing plan for the venue; inability to properly operate pool center equipment; cleanliness and water temperature issues, and on and on.

Management of the still-new facility was so wretched that Columbus Hurricanes head swimming coach Jeff Pishko warned of "several hundreds of thousands of dollars in economic impact that won't be coming to Columbus if this doesn't get fixed."

Those words proved more than prescient. Since January, when Columbus Council handed USA Pools a one-way ticket out of town, the Aquatic Center has been operated on an interim basis by Columbus Parks and Recreation. Director James Worsley told council Tuesday that members of his staff have done their best, but at the current level of funding, service and operating hours will have to be sharply cut back. The department, Worsley said, is "living on borrowed time as it comes to working these employees double duty and sometimes triple duty. We are going to be faced with some hard decisions."

Interestingly, when the city first requested bids for operation of the center, Parks and Recreation submitted a number that was more than $200,000 higher than the USA Pools figure; bids from other potential contractors have also been substantially higher than the USA Pools contract.

Worsley said that at the current budget level his department might have to shorten operating hours by almost 40 percent, reduce pool center staff, and keep the concessions stand and pro shop closed (as they have been for a while now). That's part of the conundrum: Those are possible revenue sources, but they have to be staffed.

Councilor Gary Allen alluded to the disappointingly low number of events the venue has attracted, and Councilor Skip Henderson said the Columbus Sports Council should be urged to help market what is, if properly staffed and run, a state-of-the-art facility.

It now looks more and more as if city leaders' expectations for what it would cost to operate the Aquatic Center adequately were unrealistically low. And, as is usually the case, we got what we paid for.

This story was originally published September 24, 2015 at 5:11 PM with the headline "Swim center now more challenge than attraction."