Butler Memorial Park pool to become memory
After being dry for 16 years and in need of major structural repairs, the pool and pool house at Memorial Park in Butler are on their way to becoming memories.
City council voted last week to support an application submitted by the county for a $100,000 state grant to fill in the pool and demolish the pool house.
Many residents have fond memories of the pool, but there doesn't appear to be an effort to rescue it like there was for almost 10 years after the pool closed in 2004.
A grassroots campaign to raise the $250,000 that was estimated in 2006 to repair the pool's leaks and broken filtration system started that year by teachers at Broad Street Elementary School, located near the park in the city, became known as Save Our Swimming (SOS) Pool.
By 2008, SOS fundraisers and a $5,000 donation from Armstrong generated $12,500 to save the pool. The Butler Redevelopment Authority earmarked $105,000 in 2008 Community Development Block Grant money for part of the match to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources grant for the project and $30,000 in CDBG money for pool repairs and operations.The city didn't receive the DCNR grant and the CDBG money was eventually reallocated to other projects after the save-the-pool project was abandoned due to the cost.However, the SOS effort changed course and its name in 2009, and refocused on converting the pool to a spray park.By 2010, the Save Our Spray (SOS) Park group, which was run by the same group of teachers, kept raising money and banked $25,000 for the new effort.The cost of the spray park project was estimated at $800,000 for construction and $40,000 a year to run the facility.SOS raised about $33,000 by 2014 and spent $17,000 on a feasibility study for the proposed spray park. But interest in the project fizzled the following year and SOS agreed to let the city spend the remainder of the money on building a basketball court and installing playground equipment in Rotary Park.The city held the SOS account and records show that a $20,000 contribution from the Butler County Housing Authority, the $33,090 raised by SOS and some small contributions created a balance of $53,454 in 2015.Mayor Ben Smith said the pool hasn't been inspected recently, but it has been looked at four or five times over the past 20 years.“Major structural changes” equivalent to building a new pool would be needed to make the pool meet current construction code standards, he said.The work would cost at least $2 million, and staffing and maintenance would be additional costs, he said.Former city council member Kathy Kline, who worked with SOS, commended the group for working hard to raise money for the project.By 2010, the group raised about $25,000 by selling candy bars, holding silent auctions in school, asking other teachers to donate money on dress-down days and holding an annual fundraiser called Monster Splash.“They hustled to raise $25,000. That's a lot of candy bars,” Kline said. “They were dedicated. They kept chipping away at it.”She said the cost to repair the pool to meet the construction code was $386,000 and that cost is what drove SOS to shift its focus to converting the pool to a spray park.“We just didn't have the money to do the pool. We thought the spray park was more feasible to do,” said Liane Chisholm, the now-retired teacher who spearheaded SOS. “We wanted to show our kids, if you start with nothing and you work together, things can be accomplished.“Unfortunately, we failed to show that at the end. That doesn't mean we didn't try our darndest to do it.”She said raffles for gift baskets for students were held once a month at the school and children bought tickets for 25 cents.The annual Monster Splashes included dinners, raffles, and silent auctions, she said. Several organizations donated to the effort, she added.The idea behind the efforts to save the pool and then to convert it to a splash park was to give children living in the city an option to the pool at the county-run Alameda Park, she said.“We hoped for a water facility for the community and the kids who couldn't afford to go to Alameda. We were looking for something a little more economically feasible and something they could walk to,” Chisholm said.Vince Moore of Butler swam at the pool as a child with family and friends and worked at the park as a counselor in the summers in the late 1990s while he attended college.“That kind of shaped my career. I got into human services afterward,” said Moore, who works for the county Children and Youth Service agency.He said the pool was crowded through the 1980s, but the number of people visiting the pool began declining in the 1990s.“That's where all the city kids would go in the 1980s. In its heyday, it was a very vibrant swimming pool,” Moore said.The pool attracted 500 people when it opened at 1 p.m. Aug. 9, 1950. The first person to take a swim was then-city Councilman George Kapp. He dove in from the high dive, said former Councilman Bill May, who researched the history of the pool.He said the city bought property for the park in 1946 and began planning development of the park and pool that year.Renovations to the pool were made in 1983 and 1991, but attendance bottomed out by 2002.May said 500 people a month, an average of 10 to 15 people a day, were going to the pool.“That's why they closed it. There was just no attendance,” May said.The city allowed the Butler County YMCA to run the pool in 2003 and 2004, but the organization wasn't able to make it profitable.
