I'm tempted to say it was inevitable, but news broke last week that Kelly Walsh's swimming pool, the sole surviving Casper high school pool, will have to come out next summer.
The choice was to rip it out this winter, or next summer, and to deprive the boys team of a pool, or the girls.
And I mean the boys and girls from both high school, as NCHS's pool came out last year, and of course the voters opted not to fund a new one. Now, there will be no pool at all.
I suppose that this was known for some time and I missed it, but what was a surprise to everyone was that there is going to be a cost overrun, and that part of either the girls or boy's seasons would be compromised. The decision was made to compromise the girls season, based on the logic that it won't last as long for them as the construction will start in the summer and the outdoor summer pools will still be open at the beginning of their season.
Well, I suppose that's correct but the city is still building a replacement for an outdoor pool it ripped out a couple of years ago, so there's even a bit of a deficit there. And that relies upon the good graces of the city, perhaps already conferred, which feared the school district linking its bond election to their $.01 sales tax issue in the general election, which may have resulted in the failure of the school bond issue as that was done in a special election, at the city's request, to avoid that. In a special election you are likely to omit the general voters.
All of this is a sad situation. The NC pool and probably the original KWHS pool were funded by the community directly, on their own. Now that most of our school construction is funded by the state (as long as the coal money holds out), we don't seem to be doing as good of job.
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