Consulting engineer Mike Wellman delivered the initial draft of a feasibility study for White Salmon municipal pool improvements to the City Council on June 3, initiating a project review and selection process under the auspices of the council and city staff.
The study looks at five options, which include everything from making minor improvements to the city’s 72-year-old pool (just north of Washington Street) to keep it open for a few more years, to building a new, covered facility across the way in Rhinegarten Park that would have to meet all code specifications for a building. (The White Salmon Valley School District owns both the current pool site and the park property. Both are used by the city under special use agreements.)
The latter option also suggests but does not estimate significant parking and traffic revisions on NW Washington Street: the street would become one-way only from N Main Avenue to NW Garfield Avenue, and angle parking stalls would be constructed on a portion of the south side, near the pool. The parking and other improvements, if carried out, would be handled as separate projects by White Salmon through its streets budget.
Anyone interested in reading the draft study can find it at the city’s Web site, white-salmon.net. The Web site encourages citizens to review and comment on the draft. It also advises readers that an online public survey is being set up through a Web site called Survey Monkey.
Mayor David Poucher told The Enterprise on Monday that “the City intends to have [the survey] up by this Friday, June 26, to help gather the information.”
Clerk/Treasurer Leana Johnson said the city’s Web site will have a link to the survey site. For those who don’t have Internet access, hard copies of the survey can be picked up at City Hall, at 142 E. Jewett. Johnson said staff also is looking into mailing the survey with the city’s newsletter.
Wellman does not recommend one option over the other; rather, he suggests steps the council could take as part of an in-depth process involving the public and such key stakeholders as the School District Board of Directors and the existing appointed City Pool Committee, and other political entities, such the City of Bingen and Klickitat County. Wellman’s proposal to the council is to create a Pool Super Committee to steer the process toward a final project selection for the council’s consideration.
No decision on the formation of a super committee has been made at this point. However, work is going on in the background.
According to Poucher, “The Pool Committee is drilling down into the report.”
He said committee members have been rewriting several of the questions that appear on the draft survey questionnaire in the back of the study “to make them more appropriate.” These questions will appear in the Survey Monkey survey.
“I think it is going to be very important to find out where the community is on a number of issues before we move forward,” Poucher said. “I think the survey is a critical link in the process to find out what the citizens want.”
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