Carbondale Park District Pool Survey - What are they thinking?

I was reading through the Southern Illusion today and came across the article about the Carbondale Park District meeting yesterday and wanted to comment a little.

I enjoyed how the meeting minutes didn't mention this pool idea or the survey, guess that is a good way to ram it through without complaint? I also like their web page's lack of agenda, I guess if you just post it in the back bulletin board where no one can see it, you can cloud the issues pretty well. From the minutes on the webpage -

It was moved by Commissioner Kang and seconded by Commissioner McDaniel to approve the sell of $540,000 in bonds for park purposes. Upon roll call the following Commissioners voted aye: McDaniel, Kang and Heck. Abstained: Flowers. President Heck ordered this motion passed.

Wonder what they are going to spend an extra $540k on?

The Park District sent out a really stupid survey that guaranteed the result they wanted. First question from the survey, do you think a really cool pool that was free would be good for the city? Yes from 80% according to the Southern. When asked how many were interested in paying for the pool, 33% were interested in paying. Sounds about right.

The survey is of worse quality then a one week class project from a sophomore class in Business. Didn't anyone with a brain look at it and figure out you just can't get a real answer if you write a survey like that?

If they mentioned that it was going to cost $6M and have losses of $250k per year, I bet the survey would come back greatly differently. Yes, that is what it is going to cost for a water park. Maybe more.

As I have written in this space before, Carbondale is a city of around 11,000 (if you exclude SIU students) in the metropolitan area (Carbondale, all areas served by Giant City, Unity Point and DeSoto schools) . Of those 11,000, a fair guess is that half have access to the REC Center at SIUC. The property owners are going to end up paying for this (if it happens), so I guess the SIU students will get the burden in rent increases.

There is no way the voters in the Carbondale Park District are going to vote for a huge tax increase to pay for a fancy water park. Given the Park District's history running their golf course, it is doubly certain the voters will never vote for this stupid pool. A complete waste of time and energy.

What a shame.