RCS asks county for $1.7 million

At the direction of the Rockingham County Board of Commissioners, county staff and representatives of the school system are looking for ways to fund $1.7 million in renovations to the Rockingham County High School pool.

Rockingham County Schools Assistant Superintendent Bill Holcomb presented repair estimates to commissioners Monday night. He said he hopes the actual bid figures will be less.

Repairs to the pool envelope or the structure that houses the pool are estimated to be $1,548,000. Holcomb said due to years of chlorinated condensate exposure, the T-beams are deteriorating and a temporary fix using steel plates will not hold up past the end of the year. He said there have been issues of falling concrete in the pool area.

“Indoor pools usually have problems within 20 to 25 years, and we’re seeing other pools in the area that have the same problems we’re seeing at Rockingham County High School,” he said. “The dehumidification system has seen better days, which was not installed until 1994.”

Included in the $1.7 million is also the cost of lowering the bottom of the pool to meet competition requirements set forth by the NFHS (National Federation of State High School Associations) regulations for swimming meets. The high school’s pool is currently only three feet, four inches, and needs to be four feet on the diving end.

The cost is estimated to be at $175,000 for lowering the bottom. Holcomb said this will not affect the functionality of the pool, it will just allow the schools to have swim meets at home, all of which are now held away.

Commissioner Craig Travis said he understood the need for the school to have access to the pool, but he wondered what groups were charged for using the facility during school months and during the summer.

“If you want to use that pool, I feel like we’re going to have to share the costs with the community,” he said. “They need to share in the upkeep….If you go to the YMCA, it’s the same way. I don’t feel like it’s a part of education, but it’s there and we have to deal with it.”

Holcomb said to his knowledge, they do not charge the sheriff’s office or the community college for using the facility for training purposes. The main charges for the pool come from summer usage of people learning how to swim.

Once commissioners got a rundown on the scope of the project, many voiced concerns on where the money was going to come from. Finance Officer Patricia Galloway the most likely funding streams would be from ad valorem tax revenues or the implementation of an Article 46 local option sales tax, which could possibly generate $1.4 million annually.

Other funding streams can be used such as lottery funds or ADM (average daily membership) funding. Galloway said the state has currently frozen the distribution of ADM funding for schools. She said there’s no word on when that funding stream may resume.

“The state is holding ADM funding and the balance in the lottery fund is being used for existing debt service,” Galloway said. “We have not yet been able to determine if the ADM funds are gone for good, but if it does come back, we’re good. We have a little over $6 million in the lottery funds pot, so if ADM comes back, it could help fund this debt service.”

Without the return of ADM funds, Rockingham County would be looking at a funding gap in the next two to four years of around $600,000 that could last for several years, Galloway said. If lottery funding was used for the pool project, she said the funding gap could increase to around $900,000.

Another funding source Holcomb said the schools might be able to tap into is stimulus funds. He said some school districts either used part of their money or none at all, so a redistribution is set to take place soon.

Holcomb said the pool serves thousands of members in the community each year by providing swimming lessons, scuba lessons and other types of official training through law enforcement agencies and Rockingham Community College.

When asked if the pool was a necessity, Holcomb said he didn’t know about that, but he does know the community would miss the purposes it serves.

 “If we didn’t have it, I guess we would do without it, but I think it has become an area where people have relied on it to swim, use it for rehabilitation services and scuba diving for the sheriff’s department,” he said. “If it were not there, yes we would move on…but this is the auxiliary area for Rockingham County High School. They didn’t build an auxiliary gym like the other schools have. They chose this area to be the swimming pool. It would make it more difficult on them not having this space.”

Commissioners directed County Manager Lance Metzler, along with other county officials and representatives from the school system, to outline a series of funding options the board can consider during the first meeting next month.

The board also approved Rockingham County Schools to purchase a 1.5-acre parcel of land from the Stella Jean Pearman Estate located at 193 Bethany Road. It was purchased for $6,000 and has a present tax value of $18,727. The land will be paid for out of the district’s capital outlay fund.