A final decision won’t come until December but the Great Bend City Council is looking at concepts for the next municipal swimming pool. Renderings shared at a work session on Monday with City Administrator Logan Burns included the “lazy river” feature and other amenities that people have requested.
“What you’re seeing on the screen is a $9-10 million pool project,” Burns said during his presentation. “This was developed out of conversations with the pool committee.”
All of the money will come from the .15% Quality of Life sales tax that voters approved in November of 2021.
Originally the committee looked at a project in the ballpark of $6-6.5 million but the result would have been a smaller pool.
In 2022, the City and the Great Bend Recreation Commission shared the $16,000 cost to develop a site plan with renderings for major improvements on the south side of Brit Spaugh Park. That project was tabled in 2024 after bids came in much higher than the original estimate of $2.1 million.
No formal action was taken at Monday’s work session, but the council agreed that the $1.7 million already set aside for the tabled project could be added to the pool project. Burns noted that some of the park projects have since been done elsewhere, such as the basketball court at Eisenhower Park and the mini-pitch soccer courts at Heizer Park.
“The bad part is we did spend money on those plans; that’s probably the biggest thing that hurts,” he said. On the other hand, he said the pool project is something rare that needs to be done right. “You don’t get a chance to rebuild this.”
The pool in its present form is just shy of 12,000 square feet (water area). The proposal comes in at 10,800 square feet.
“We lose about 1,000 square feet, but I think we’re hitting on every amenity. One of the main ones was a lazy river,” Burns said. That is a continuously flowing stream that allows people to float along on tubes. “This one is around 215 lineal feet, about 10 feet wide.”
Mayor Cody Schmidt asked GBRC’s Aquatics Director Megan Hammeke to talk about a previous concern that a lazy river would require more lifeguards. The way this proposal is laid out, there are no hidden corners so it would only take two lifeguards, one at each corner, she said.
Another feature in the shallow water is the slides. Hammeke said the new ones will be special-needs accessible.
“This summer especially, we had a lot of complaints (such as), if you have autistic kids who are 8 or 9 and they are too tall to go down our littlest slide, because you have to be 40 inches or below ... but they’re too afraid to go down our big slide. These will allow them to do that – you can be 12-13, and go down these slides and get a taste of that without having to be fearful.”
After the shallow water there is an area 5 feet deep that gradually steps down to a depth of 13 feet, allowing one-meter and three-meter diving boards. Then there’s a “flight-time slide,” which Burns described as “31 feet to the platform, so you’re really going to get kids who go down there and come flying out.”
Finally, there will be an eight-lane swimming pool that would allow the city to host meets.
More on financing
With $1,721,842 from the Brit Spaugh project as a down payment on a $9 million pool, payments on a 20-year bond at 4% interest would be $544,873, which the Quality of Life Sales Tax is expected to cover. The project includes mechanical improvements. It keeps the big tipping bucket and play features, as well as the bathhouse.
Mayor Schmidt said the City may need to consider higher fees for the waterpark in the future.
Hammeke said another possible revenue stream would be to add a party area people could rent, perhaps where the water balloon launchers for “water wars” is located now. No one used that feature last year, she said.
