Pools seem to generate problems for bureaucrats no where they go and how much you pay them.RESIDENTS in the Maroondah Leader 's catchment "will need to double the number of times they take a dip if Ringwood’s proposed mega-pool is to deliver its promised financial return to ratepayers, council documents show."
Maroondah Council’s budget has revealed plans to build a $48 million Regional Leisure and Aquatic Centre in Ringwood.
The council plans to borrow between $38 million and $40 million to fund the new pool, which is set to open by 2013.
The existing Ringwood Aquatic Centre is set to close in May next year, with the 90 staff at the centre being made redundant.
The council budget will see rates jump by 9.8 per cent as the council attempts to end it’s budget deficit, but 1.1 per cent of the rate hike will be used to help plan for the new pool. If any of this sounds familiar to Launcestonians that is no surprise at all.
The Maroondah Leader won access to parts of the Ringwood Aquatic Centre Redevelopment Feasibility Study (unsurprisingly this is not publicly available), and it outlines the Maroondah Council’s $48 million new swimming centre plan.
There were consultants, the Simply Great Leisure Group (SGL), and they it seems developed the new pool’s business plan. That plan had some "key assumptions” it seems. Anyone receiving a report from a consultant who makes "assumptions" should be very worried. Yes it seems they did survey 500 residents but an assumption is an assumption.
It is being assumed that the new centre will attract "600,000 to 720,000, compared with the existing pool’s 287,426 visitors in 2008-09". TRA has been informed that for Launceston's facility:
- the old pool attracted something in the order of 120,000 visits pa
- The assumption upon which the new pool was built was approx 420,000 visits pa
- The budgeted deficit for its first year of operation was approx $450,000
- The actual deficit was in the order of $1 million.
The Maroondah Leader story has a thread .... click here to read more
However, does any of this ring a bell?
The council budget will see rates jump by 9.8 per cent as the council attempts to end it’s budget deficit, but 1.1 per cent of the rate hike will be used to help plan for the new pool."
Petar Hill
2 comments:
An idea to help the pool complex earn more money would be to convert the large meeting room to a fitness gymnasium.
Surely the combination of swimming and a gymnasium would work?
If there ever was a need for meetings at Windmill Hill, then there is that lovely little Memorial Hall just across the lawns and hardly ever used these days which is a real shame.
Signed
Get Fit, Get wet, Get Real.
Well fit,wet and real, you are a bit late with your advice simply because the horse has bolted. The opportunity to do what you asked was squashed by gym owners way way back and very early on in the non-planning.
They were screaming UNFAIR and all that. But what is unfair is Launceston's ratepayers carrying a million dollar plus loss every year from now until eternity.
What is really unfair is lazy bureaucrats failing to do a proper business and marketing plan.
But we find out that even in Melbourne to afford a new grand vision swimming pool residents there need to go swimming twice as much to satisfy a bureaucratic grand vision. In the corporate world they'd get short shift!
Now there are so many gyms in town that one at the pool would be hard pressed to compete and if the Council tried it would be UNFAIR all over again.
Where we go I know not where.
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