St. Albans City broke ground this week on a year-round municipal swimming pool at the Hard’ack Recreation Area, a $5 million project originally proposed as a joint venture with neighboring St. Albans Town.
Officials say the new pool will allow St. Albans City to bolster its recreation offerings, which they hope will help draw new residents to the area.
“Part of the inspiration for it came from being down at the Burlington YMCA, watching the swim lessons and the after-school programming that was occurring there,” said St. Albans City Manager Dominic Cloud. “We don’t have anything like that in Franklin County.”
The project is funded by a 1% local option sales tax, which city voters approved in March 2020. Yearly debt payments are expected to be $300,000.
Also included in the total cost is a pool house building, improvements to the access road off Congress Street, a new recreation path and $250,000 to improve a park not far from the city’s existing municipal pool.
Cloud said the existing pool, which is across Aldis Street from St. Albans City School, “had reached the end of its useful life.” The pool almost did not open in the summers of 2019 and 2020, and it has parking available only when the school is closed.
A design process is underway to determine how the $250,000 will be spent, he said.
The new pool will be about twice as large as the existing pool and include a sloped entrance — similar to a beach — to make it accessible for young children, older adults and people who need mobility assistance.
In the winter, it will be covered with an inflatable dome to allow swimming when it’s cold out. The pool, and air inside the dome, will be heated with natural gas.
‘Cheaper to work together’
When voters considered the pool project in 2020, it was a joint proposal between St. Albans City and St. Albans Town, in which both communities would share the cost.
While city voters overwhelmingly backed the proposal, town voters defeated it by a narrow margin. St. Albans City officials chose to go ahead with the project on their own, and city voters passed a revised proposal this March.
The Hard’ack Recreation Center is owned by the city government but located in St. Albans Town. It has hiking trails, a skiing and sledding hill, a disk golf course, and other amenities.
Under the new proposal, the cost to St. Albans City nearly doubled, from $2.5 million to $5 million, but engineers reduced the overall cost of the project by making the pool house smaller and opting to leave the access road in its current location.
Cloud said St. Albans City and Town have “a tortured history of figuring out how to work together.” The communities are closely linked, he said, sharing services such as a unified school district along with the town of Fairfield to the east.
This month, the town ended its partnership with the city’s police department, opting instead for a new patrol contract with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.
Cloud said the city government is “always eager to work with the town” on municipal projects.
“You have to take each issue as its own policy area and challenge,” he said, referring to the pool project. “It’s always cheaper to work together.”
Cloud said having a pool at Hard’ack will give families unique recreation opportunities in the winter — for instance, kids could take swimming lessons while their parents cross-country ski outside.
The city estimates residents will pay $5 to swim for half a day at the pool in the summer and at least $8 for half a day in the winter. Nonresident fees would be twice that.
“The infrastructure that we’re laying for the pool lays the groundwork for future recreational amenities,” Cloud said. “And recreational amenities are a big part of the city’s economic development strategy.”
