As anyone who occasionally reads this blog already knows, a bond issue that would have funded a new pool at NCHS failed by 400 votes earlier this year, even though other tax issues passed in the general election. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it seems pretty clear that if the pool bond issue had been in the general election, it would have passed. People just don't get out for special elections unless motivated, and the bond issue election came up at a time when Tea Party elements in the state appeared to be ascendant, but prior to their dramatic decline in the general election. It seems reasonable to deduce that the actual population would have supported the bond issue.
Now we have to live with the consequences of that, which for now seemingly means no pool at NCHS in spite of having a massive new structure under construction which could house it. The paper this morning, in one of its series of end of the year articles, briefly gave me hope as it featured a photograph of the inside of the now demolished pool in an article that stated early on that the district was saving money to pay for what the bond would have paid for.
That's accurate to a small extent, but that small extent concerns equipment for the new facility focusing on trades and sciences the district is building, not for the pools. That is sort of, badly, cleared up late in the article, but not enough, I'm quite sure, to cure the confusion that the article creates. The Tribune gets a D here on this one.
But still, why not get the pool built? Yes, the money isn't there, but the huge structure is, and without trying to do something now, it'll never happen. We have a newly elected school board, and they should address this. The last board backed the pools, and this one would seem to. Let's try to get it built somehow.
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