It increasingly looks like our new community pool, if it’s ever built, won’t be in Port Townsend. It will probably be  in Chimacum or,  more likely, in Port Hadlock. Get ready for a longer drive, fellow PT swimmers. 

Why not build it in PT, this frustrated swimmer asked someone in the know? (A frustrated swimmer and Leader reader recently asked  me the same thing…why doesn’t PT just build its own pool?)

Not surprisingly, the answer is money — or lack of it. And also, the county’s taxable population distribution, of which Port Townsend is only a third. 

A longtime backer of a PT pool, Jefferson County Aquatic Coalition president Diane McDade, now seems reconciled to a pool outside of PT. “If the money was there,” she sighs, “It would have been built. Our current pool is over 60 years old and is failing.”

Or is in the process of actively failing. The Mountain View pool has now been closed for a month after a water-main break ruined a lot of infrastructure equipment, and it won’t reopen, the city says, until late July. Oy.

It’s been a frustrating and physically uncomfortable time for those of us who use and need the PT pool as our only/main way to get much-needed cardio. (The YMCA, which runs the pool for the city, has stepped up, and is running a twice-weekly shuttle for PT swimmers to their fine swimming pool in Sequim. I’ve been taking that shuttle along with McDade, and I’m counting the days until our pool can reopen.)

McDade admits, “PT doesn’t have money to fix the roads,” and she also pointed out that many pool users don’t live in PT, ergo the new pool site posisibilities. 

A brief new-pool history: Last year, capable PT City Manager John Mauro and other local leaders like Jefferson Healthcare CEO Mike Glenn formed a Healthy Together steering committee that carefully looked at building a new pool. Their finding: It would cost about $37 million, a heavy tax hit on only PT residents.

Meanwhile, a local online right-wing (alleged) news site, began running ridiculous articles by one zealous reporter saying that a new PT  pool would cost about as much as a new aircraft carrier. (I’m exaggerating, of course, but not much). 

County Commissioners Greg Brotherton and Heidi Eisenhour, the swing county commish votes, both opposed a new tax to the county.  That killed the deal. 

But now, there’s a new, eight-member County Task Force that has been examining county sites and various pool designs. They’re even checking out a new pool built over in Boise.

“I feel a lot better that Greg Brotherton is now onboard,” says McDade, who knows the terrain well, having worked on various  political campaigns. And the reporter who was conjuring up the  costly-pool stories has also apparently cooled his jets and is now part of this task force. 

The pool’s been through some rough times even before all this, you may have read. A long-time pool user here who was banished  by the YMCA two years ago after a transphobic locker-room incident, summoned up homophobes who demonstrated here in PT after she went on Fox News and pled her righteous cause. This aggrieved transphobic swimmer has (yawn) recently filed suit against the city through — surprise — a far-right law firm. 

 Proud Boy types were outnumbered about 50 to 1 at a demonstration here after Trump types unleashed a vicious, anti-PT troll assault that resulted in death threats against YMCA staff here. Charming. The pool director chose to resign. 

 Meanwhile, the Aquatic Coalition (disclosure: I’m a largely useless board member of its board) has invited members of the board of South Whidbey’s Parks and Recreation department to talk about the design of their upcoming new pool. The public is invited to that meeting at 515 p.m. on June 26  at the PT library’s Pink House. 

You can’t say designs for a modern, cheaper new pool haven’t been rigorously investigated. 

 I’m praying that our current, beleaguered pool reopens and we get a few more months of use out of it before it fails for good. Fingers crossed. 

PT humorist and lap swimmer Bill Mann’s dry-land address is Newsmann9@gmail.com