It Could Be Tomorrow

On the evening of Wednesday the second of September the Ashland Parks and Recreation Commission held a study session with one real item on it, and Interim Director Rachel Dials set the terms of the discussion in her first thirty seconds. A new public aquatic facility is “really not on the horizon.” The city’s strategic plan asks the department to maintain what it already has. So the question before the commission was not what kind of pool Ashland should build but what it would cost to keep the one it owns from failing without warning, and whether that number could go into the draft capital improvement plan for the next biennium.

Then Recreation Supervisor Lonnie Flora put photographs of the pump room on the screen and talked for twenty-eight minutes, and the photographs are the story.

A Retrofitted Duck Pond Pump

The Daniel Meyer Memorial Pool opened in 1984 and is forty-two years old. A public pool can run thirty or fifty or sixty years and longer, Flora told the commission, depending on the maintenance and the care, and the care is where this story lives. The liner went in early in 2024 and has three seasons on it and seven years left on a ten-year warranty, and the ripples visible under the water are the new liner following the shape of the failing surface and the lifted tiles beneath it. The pool operates under Oregon Health Authority rules and the national Model Aquatic Health Code, which require a working pump at a specified flow rate, a filtration system, a sanitation system and a heater. It was built for swimming lessons and a place to cool off in the summer, which Flora said is still the department’s first priority, but as other pools in the valley have closed this one has been pressed into running year round for the schools, the teams, the masters swimmers and the lap swimmers.

Days before the 2019 season was due to open, the main pump failed. The park supervisor found a spare ten-horsepower pump on hand and retrofitted it, and in the photograph you can see where the plumbing was reduced to make it fit, white pipe stepping down to blue. That is still the pump. It has been the pump for seven seasons. It has no middle setting, running at a hundred percent or not at all, and it is almost never off, because the water in a year-round pool has to keep moving. Any failure of that one component closes the pool until it is replaced.

Vice Chair Mike Gardiner supplied the part Flora had not. “That pump that we saw in the picture is a retrofitted duck pond pump. So it was used to move water in the duck pond.” Later he added, “I’m surprised that that pump is still working.” When Commissioner Justin Adams asked how long the system lasts if the commission does nothing at all, Flora named the same component. “It could be tomorrow, it could be five years from now.”

Gallons And Gallons And Gallons

The filter is a high-rate sand vessel six to eight feet tall holding forty-odd cubic feet of media. The porthole through which it is cleaned is about eighteen inches across, and it is leaking, and the leak has got worse. The manufacturer has not told the department whether a replacement porthole exists or whether the seal can be repaired. If it goes, the pool closes until it is fixed. Cleaning it means scraping wet sand out by hand through the eighteen inches. Staff asked the city’s wastewater division whether the vacuum truck could do the job instead, and the answer was no, because of the slope of the ramp from the parking lot and the distance to the back of the room.

The backwash control panel has not worked in the memory of anyone now on staff. Flora’s description of it was “it’s basically useless.” So to backwash the filter a person squeezes through a gap behind the pipework, which Flora had measured on camera at just over a foot, and throws a lever by hand. Before that the valves have to be isolated and the filter basket opened, at which point, in his words, “gallons and gallons and gallons of water just pour out onto the floor.” The backwash itself takes under a minute. The flow meter is in a corner that cannot be reached without stepping over and through the plumbing.

The chlorine tablet feeder failed some years ago, so the pool is now sanitized with liquid bleach through a peristaltic pump. Staff load empty carboys into a vehicle, drive to Medford, bring the full ones back on a lift truck, wheel them up a ramp on a hand truck and carry them down the stairs, there being no accessible entrance to the pump room at all. Flora offered one thing he said he had only recently learned, which is that liquid bleach has a shelf life and loses disinfectant strength as it sits, “so it’s hard to know how good a bleach, what kind of bleach we’re getting.” The muriatic acid that holds the pH down is corrosive enough to be kept in a room of its own, and the door of that room has been eaten into pits.

There is an automatic chemical controller with sensors along the circulation run, and it was meant to dose the chlorine and correct the pH without anybody present. “Staff really struggled to operate this thing and eventually it just kind of blanked out and it’s worth nothing.” It is also obsolete. So somebody does a drop test every one to two hours, walks down to the pump room and changes the settings by hand.

The heat comes from a natural gas boiler, which is under a service contract and in fairly good repair, and is the one piece of the room nobody is worried about. Two pipes beside it go nowhere. They used to feed a solar heating tube system mounted on a flat-roofed shade structure. Vines grew over the structure, the wood rotted, the weight of the tubes finished it, the tubes were never put back up anywhere else, and the loop was capped off and left on the wall, where it remains, being the previous answer to a question the commission was about to ask again.

Around $400,000

What staff want to put in the capital plan is a set of variable-frequency- drive pumps that throttle with the number of swimmers rather than running flat out, and, if the commission wants it, two of them in parallel so that one failure does not empty the building. A regenerative filter about forty-two inches across in place of the sand vessel, which turns the water over faster, loses less heat into the media and clears a fecal incident in a fraction of the twelve hours the sand filter needs. Calcium hypochlorite tablets instead of liquid bleach, with dry acid or a carbon dioxide system for pH, all of which can be delivered to the site, which ends the Medford runs. A new control panel with remote monitoring, so that an alert reaches a telephone instead of a person walking down every hour. Better plumbing, more storage, safer access. Energy Trust of Oregon and Bonneville Power may pay rebates on some of it.

The figure is about four hundred thousand dollars, and it covers a design consultant, decommissioning and removal of the old equipment, drawings, bid documents, the equipment itself, the labor and the training of staff to run it. Flora was candid that it will move. “Once we get into actual bid, that number could change.”

Commissioner Rick Landt did the arithmetic out loud. Seven years left on the liner warranty, assume the new equipment lasts at least that long, “so what we would be doing then is spending the equivalent of $57,000 a year over seven years, and frankly that sounds pretty reasonable to me.” Then he asked what a variable-frequency-drive pump costs on its own, and Flora said about three thousand dollars, the expensive part being the filter they are usually packaged with. So Landt asked the obvious next question, which was whether the four hundred thousand therefore included the second pump the commission had just been told was the whole point of the exercise.

It did not, and the reason is that the estimate has no components in it. “I didn’t do kind of a breakdown of each component cost,” Flora said. “I used the quotes from similar projects that occurred around the state and we did kind of overestimate.” The similar projects are in Sweet Home and Tillamook, where pumps packaged with filters came in around a hundred and fifteen thousand, and he ran the total past a couple of operators and people in the field and was comfortable with it.

Landt said he supported the concept and then said the rest of it plainly. “I do think that we should have more information than what we currently have about the actual cost.” Gardiner: “I would be in line with Commissioner Landt that I’d really want to see the line item of how we get there.” Adams asked the question underneath both of theirs, which nobody answered, about a department facing at best a flat budget next year: “where’s the 400K gonna come from?”

Dials read the direction back at the end. Line-item costs. Price the solar option. Look again at what the consultants presented last time. Include a two- pump configuration with a backup. Landt added that redundancy was worth looking for elsewhere in the system too, not only in the pumps.

The Robot Says

Early in the session the chair asked what the liner had cost in 2024. In about ninety seconds the room produced three answers.

Chair Jim Bachman went first, at “two-fifty, I wanna say three,” and came back a moment later with “I think it was more like 200.” Flora said he thought twenty thousand. Dials put it in the twenty-thousand-ish range, possibly eighteen, and said she was not positive and would find out. Then Commissioner Andrea Weiner said, “Well, the robot says it was $61,000 to put the liner in.”

Dials offered to check it the next day and email the commissioners. Bachman thanked her and said, “That’s how my memory works.”

This paper is not going to average those, or pick the likeliest, or quietly report the one that sounds most like a pool liner. The department bought the thing three years ago and the figure is in a file. The body that authorized the purchase could not produce it in the room, and the nearest thing to a citation anybody offered was a chatbot.

I Got Off The Rah-Rah Pool Boat

Three people spoke. Jocelyn Sanford has lived in Ashland since the spring of 2002, has represented the United States in international water polo competition, and has held a Certified Pool Operator certificate for ten years across three terms, which means she has worked in the room Flora had been photographing. “And yeah, there is some maneuvering around pipes and things.” She listed who uses the pool: Rogue Valley Masters, the Ashland Water Polo Club, Ashland High School swimming, and Phoenix High School in the past. She said the town needs a longer-term answer than the one on the table.

Janika de la Mater came with her sister and their mother, who is a hundred and one. They have been using the pool all summer and would like to use it through the year as well.

Resa Buck has lived here since 1991 and swum for most of it, and she gave the evening its frame.

“I really had no idea the severity of the duct-taping that our park staff have been doing, miraculously, really, that we have a pool at all right now. I am really grateful and support it 200 percent, but I need to pause, because I got off the rah-rah pool boat back in January of 2020, when the city parks and the pool committee had spent money on a plan, time, got approval from the council for the 6.2, $6.3 million pool — and COVID happened. The food and beverage tax dollars weren’t available to us and so a new more permanent solution for a pool just drowned. And here we are seven years later and we’re still band- aiding what I see as a really important part of quality of life in Ashland.”

She added that as a swimmer who belongs to no team she speaks for most of the town, and that she gets the pool for less than three months a year.

We Haven’t Moved Anything Forward To Fill That Gap

The rest of the history sits in the record behind her, in order.

In May 2023 a staff member told the budget committee that the pool carries the Meyer family’s name because the Meyer family paid for it when it was built, “I believe in around ’86-ish,” and floated selling the naming rights again as one way of funding a replacement. Flora says the pool opened in 1984. The two dates disagree and neither has been checked against anything other than a transcript, so the paper prints both and leaves them there.

In the same briefing the committee was told what a replacement would take. The capital plan then showed two million dollars of food and beverage tax money available for the pool, with the remainder, “around $8 million, eight and a half million dollars,” to come from grants or bonds, grants being “a little bit more of a long shot.” Then the sentence the department has not been able to retire since: “we haven’t moved anything forward to fill that gap yet.”

In September 2023 a commissioner warned the others off the pool reserve, which the commission had taken to calling seed money. “Having a down payment, which is what we currently have, is really important.” Two months later, facing about a million dollars less in the biennium, staff brought three scenarios. The first of them took the entire million out of the Daniel Meyer rebuild fund. The second kept exactly a million in it and cut the all-parks master plan, Oak Knoll and trails instead.

That winter the liner project ran late and the pool sat empty. Todd Landry, who coaches the Ashland High School swim team, wrote to the commission that the season would open at the Ashland YMCA in three lanes at about the same cost, in water warm enough that he had to watch his swimmers for overheating, which was better than nothing and far from ideal. Rogue Valley Masters, more than thirty adults, scattered to two different YMCAs, “and some people have stopped swimming altogether.” His letter made the argument the pump room made again three years later.

“Daniel Meyer is 40 years old. It won’t last forever, as we’ve seen with the pool bottom literally disintegrating over the last several years. The new liner may be a bandaid for a few years, but it also has a lifespan… We can’t wait until the Daniel Meyer pool has catastrophic failure before planning to replace what is not just a luxury item in town, but a necessary part of the fabric of a functional, vibrant city.”

In December 2024 a resident came to the commission in support of a twenty- four-million-dollar capital plan and named the line in it he cared about, “the $12 million that’s mentioned in that for a potential new pool at some point in the future,” and asked the commission to support extending the food and beverage tax past its 2030 sunset. That tax is the money underneath every paragraph above, and it is a story this paper owes the town separately.

Sometimes You Still Gotta Think About Big Projects

Adams said the thing the evening was circling. “There’s just another reminder to us that operating an old pool is not free. It’s not even cheap. And we haven’t had a conversation recently about what a real planning process for a true aquatic center in our community, which we really could use and really could have used for the last decade or more since SOU pool closed, might look like. I know that when budgets are tight, we have a tendency not to want to think about big projects. But sometimes you still gotta think about big projects.” Of the retrofitted pump he said it “has the look of a piece of duct tape that has done extraordinarily well.”

Bachman agreed and named the vehicle, which is a joint session with the city council, “because it’s going to need financing, it’s gonna have to be part of a bigger plan and the timing is unknown at this time.” His own preference is for a second pool built into a new development, probably at Ashland Mills on the Therman Mills property, so that the town is never without one while the other is down.

On the boiler he went further than his staff had. “I think we have to have in our thinking that we’re gonna phase out this gas heater and replace it with something more in line with the city’s environmental ethic. We certainly can’t just remove it and spend a lot of money on a solution right now, but we should have a firm commitment to phasing it out and have a plan to do that when the time comes.” Ashland has an electrification ordinance, a climate and environment advisory committee, and a live question about renewing the Avista gas franchise. It also has a gas boiler heating its only public pool, which staff are explicitly not recommending be changed, because converting it “would be much more expensive and need a lot of extra study,” the water being heated in winter. They are working on it with the electric department and the Conservation Division. The capped pipes from the last solar attempt are eight feet away.

Adams asked whether solar water heating could be priced as an elective line, and Flora said it could be investigated. Dials remembered that when solar was studied during the expansion work the proposal had been panels over the tennis courts rather than on the bathhouse, and could not remember whether they were photovoltaic or thermal. Landt remembered the consultants not thinking solar an efficient use of resources, and then said the thing a person says who has sat through a few of these. “But on the other hand I would also say that the consultants were not in every case spot on.”

The Verdict

The calendar is the part that decides this. Capital plan numbers are not expected from finance until the middle of January. Dials said what that means without being asked: “that will obviously be when a new commission is on.” The Parks Commission is elected on the third of November, and the joint meeting with the council that had been scheduled for that night is being moved, because it is election night.

So a department has asked for four hundred thousand dollars it cannot yet break into parts, two of five commissioners have said they want the parts before they vote, and the vote itself belongs to a commission that will not be elected until November 3 and will see the numbers in January. That is not a failure of the staff work, which was thorough, photographed, and honest about what it did not know. It is what a budget process looks like when it asks a body to endorse a figure before anyone can see inside it and then hands the consequence to whoever arrives next.

Nobody in that room disagreed about whether Ashland should have a pool. That is the part worth sitting with. In 2020 the town had a costed plan for a six- point- three-million-dollar one with council approval behind it, and lost it to a revenue collapse. In 2023 the shortfall was eight and a half million with nothing moved forward to close it, and the first option on the table for absorbing a bad biennium was the rebuild fund itself. Nobody ever voted to run a public pool on a pump salvaged from the duck pond. They voted, several times, in public, for other things first, which is what deferred maintenance actually is and why no one is ever responsible for it.

Publish the line items before the commission is asked to endorse the figure, and publish what the liner cost, which the department promised in writing on September 3 and which settles nothing except whether the city can account for its own spending. Then put the aquatic center on a joint agenda with the council, with a number and a date attached, before the next thing in that room fails. And be honest about what the alternative to it is. Ashland has other water. The YMCA has a pool and the tennis and fitness club has a pool, and both of them are private clubs that a household joins and pays for, the fitness club at the top of the range. The high school team swam three lanes at the Y the winter the liner ran late, the masters team scattered between two of them, and the swimmers who could not follow stopped swimming, which is what the coach wrote to this commission at the time. Daniel Meyer is the only water in this town a person does not have to buy their way into. A town that cannot keep its public pool running has not lost an amenity. It has quietly moved one more thing behind a membership desk, in a place where the list of things behind that desk is already long and the rent went up again. The people who will pay for another seven years of this are a hundred and one years old, or six, or paying dues somewhere. Flora was asked how long the pump has. He said it could be tomorrow.

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Sources: the caption transcript of the September 2, 2026 Parks and Recreation Commission study session, where the pump room presentation, the cost discussion and all three public comments occurred, and the study session packet published for it. The history comes from the commission’s and the budget committee’s own recordings between May 2023 and December 2024, which is a caption corpus and not a document archive, so the figures in that section are quoted as the city said them out loud and not as its books record them. Two facts in this piece are unresolved on purpose. The pool’s opening year is given as 1984 by staff and as around 1986 by the budget committee briefing that explains the name, and the gift agreement itself is not in the corpus the paper works from. What the 2024 liner cost is the subject of three answers in this article and the department owes the commissioners a fourth in writing; when it arrives the paper will print it. Nothing here rests on the 2020 pool plan, which was approved and abandoned before the caption record begins and which the paper will go after next. The dues charged by the Ashland YMCA and the Ashland Tennis and Fitness Club are not printed here because the paper has not put a figure to either; that both are membership clubs, and that the city’s pool is not, is the whole of the comparison being made. The minutes of the September 2 session are not approved and quotations are as transcribed, with the software’s garbles repaired and the speakers’ own left where they fell.