Permit Application for New Pleasantville Pool Nears; Village Eyes 2024 Opening
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As the 2022 pool season gets underway, last week it was confirmed that final drawings for the new Pleasantville village pool will soon be completed.
Steve Rimkunas, of Rimkunas Engineering, the firm overseeing the project for the village, said the drawings will be submitted at the end of this month to the Westchester County Department of Health to obtain the permits needed for construction. It is expected to take about 12 to 16 weeks before the permits are received, he said.
Rimkunas anticipates the new pool, which will be installed at the current Lake Street site, to be ready for the start of the 2024 swim season.
“The Department of Health always has comments and it takes time but you can expect to go out to bid and award a contract by the end of January 2023,” Rimkunas said during an update he provided to the Village Board at its June 13 work session. “We want a shovel in the ground by Labor Day 2023 with a projected opening date on Memorial Day 2024.”
The drawings will be posted on the village website when they are completed.
Supply chain issues and rising costs of materials are concerns.
“Many municipal projects are coming in at 50 percent over cost estimates,” Rimkunas said. “However, labor costs have been fairly stable.”
Original estimates for the pool project were about $3 million, but with the price of materials escalating, projections are now closer to $4 million, he said. The village plans to fund the project with a bond and a modest increase in pool membership fees.
“We’re not doing anything extravagant or unusual for this project,” said Rimkunas when asked if current costs could be scaled back. “There’s not a whole lot we can take away.”
Mayor Peter Scherer asked about lining up a contractor as soon as possible once a construction bid was accepted.
“This would allow a contractor to buy supplies early, which should improve our chances of finishing on time,” Scherer said. “Perhaps the village could provide the contractor with storage space.”
There had been a delay in the process because village officials were considering a parallel project to protect the new pool from flooding by preventing stormwater from streaming from Nannahagen Pond. Estimates for that mitigation ranged from $650,000 to more than $1 million, significantly adding to the project’s cost. Since then, a rainfall analysis completed by de Bruin Engineering determined any mitigation would not be cost-effective.
“Based on de Bruin’s advice, the big expense would not mitigate the risk,” Scherer said. “We’ve had (major) floods twice in the last four years where silt and mud has ended up in the kiddie pool, the main pool and the pump house. Recovering from a similar storm would cost the village somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000, which is a small fraction of what a flood mitigation project would cost.”
Originally, the village had hoped the new pool for 2023, but delays on determining a final scope of work pushed the projected opening to 2024.
Abby is a local journalist who has reported on breaking news for more than 20 years. She currently covers community issues in The Examiner as a full-time reporter and has written for the paper since its inception in 2007. Read more from Abby’s editor-author bio here. Read Abbys’s archived work here: https://www.theexaminernews.com/author/ab-lub2019/
