Bursting Our Bewitched Bubble

It’s that dreaded time of year again. Monstrous in magnitude. A mysterious ritual. Strange, scary, sinister, and spooky. Macabre and menacing. Dark and gloomy. Dastardly and disturbing. Gruesome and ghoulish. Frightful. Creepy. Petrifying. Even eerie. A wicked, morbid tradition that haunts our city annually.

You guessed it, right? Well, maybe not. If you supposed Halloween, guess again.  

It’s much more bizarre and terrifying.  It turns our city staffers into zombies. It makes their blood curdle and evokes shrill shrieks of terror. It’s the hair-raising material of horror films. 

Yep, it’s once again Bubble-Up time in Boulder City. That time of year when we blow up a big, supernatural balloon to ward off the evil spirits and try to hide our city’s decaying, decomposed, and rotten swimming pool from the Grim Reaper for yet another season.

The only span of the year that’s almost as gory and ominous is Bubble Down time in the spring, when we once again expose our Frankenstein to the cold, uncaring, pitiful stares of the world again. 

If I have my math right, our public pool is now almost 45 years old.  That’s over 300 in dog-paddling years.  

Yes, we’ve called on black magic many times to keep the corpse alive.  But eventually even the best of spells cease.  The voodoo vanishes.  The enchantments expire.  The talismans terminate.  And the witchcraft wears off.

Maybe it’s time to brew up a new recipe for success?  A more potent potion?  One that relies less on newts’ eyes, frog legs, dog tongues, bat wool, and lizard legs.  And more on a healthy dose of daring decisiveness.

The figures that the city routinely publishes these days indicate that the original cost estimate in 2021 was $27 million, escalated to almost $37 million just two years later, and now ranges in the $42 million to $44 million range.  That’s mostly true if you’re talking about the current simplified design that includes a covered competition pool and recreation pool, with the option for an outdoor splash pad and kiddie pool.  But there was an even earlier 2018 design for less than $27 million that included not only pools but several other amenities like a fitness center, food and beverage court, meeting and multi-purpose rooms, new racquetball courts, and an outdoor water park with slides.

I understand the virtues of the pay-as-you-go principle.  But now we’re getting far less and paying a ghastly amount more to get it.  In fact, because we waited in Limbo so long, we’ll spend at least 60%-70% more for a fraction of the amenities.  And possibly almost 100% more (i.e., double the cost) by the time the last nail is driven into the coffin.

That’s enough to drive anyone batty. But that’s what we get when we slumber on portentous opportunities while inflation is alive, awake, and working around the clock like the walking dead. 

We’ve been talking about the need for a new pool in Boulder City since at least 2010.  So why, then, are we now a devilish decade and a half down the road and still waiting for one?

I’m encouraged that we now have a City Council that finally bit the silver bullet and had enough spirit to authorize the expenditure of $1.6 million for the final design of the new pool project.  But what will happen if the sale of Tract 350 to Toll Brothers doesn’t pan out or doesn’t come to fruition fast enough to get the $19 million portion earmarked for the new pool?  Will we stay the course and move forward? Or will we hesitate and let the Headless Horseman of inflation continue to haunt us over and over in an endless loop of nightmares?

What kind of bone-chilling thriller are we so afraid of?  That we might have a nice, new aquatics facility that we can actually use for a fraction of the price?  Now that would be a shockingly pleasant surprise worth howling at!

Until then, though, we simply have no choice but to keep chanting like Shakespeare’s three possessed weird sister witches: “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, put up the bubble!”