The Morrisville Aquatics & Fitness Center (MAFC) pool is now open and boy did they get almost everything right. Unlike other recently built area pools, I’m looking at you NW Cary YMCA, this pool appears to have been built by a group that actually knows something about swimming. Here are some of the highlights:

• Continuous gutters
• 8 ft deep end
• Permanent starting blocks
• No wall water return jets
• Separate leisure / kids pool areas
• Lap swim friendly water temperature
• Retractable roof to allow fresh air / sunlight in

The only minor quibbles I have are the pool is only 6 lanes and the lane lines look like they use 4″ floats. Definitely where the money ran out. But other than that it’s a fantastic pool. I love the almost all glass structure with retractable roof segments. It’s like swimming outdoors year round only with better temperature regulation.

This is truly the pool Cary should have built (well, maybe 8 lanes with a little more deck space for meets). Thankfully Morrisville is surrounded by Cary and they offer really low per swim rates even for non-residents. So thank you Morrisville. You’re a relatively small town yet you were able to do what the bigger and better financed Cary couldn’t.

The renovation of the Morrisville Aquatics & Fitness Center (MAFC) is finally happening.  And included in that renovation are two new indoor pools!  While it’s not Cary, Morrisville is close enough to be exciting news and certainly helps ease some of year round lane shortage in Cary.

The MAFC will close on Friday, November 16. The facility will be closed for about a year and is scheduled to reopen in late 2019.  When it does, gone will be the bubbled 4 lane pool, replaced by a new 6-lane lap pool and separate play pool.  The new year-round natatorium will be constructed with a retractable roof to allow for open-air use in the warmer months.  So that’s pretty awesome.

The only sad news is the pool has gone from a planned 8 lanes down to 6.  I’m sure cost constraints played a large factor in that revision.  Still 6 is better than the previous 4 lanes and infinitely better than anything Town of Cary has provided residents.

Not sure how I missed this back in November, but Morrisville has revised its strategy for upgrading the aquatic center.  Given the current upgrade efforts are $1M+ over the available funding, Morrisville is now looking at covering the upgraded pool with a permanent vinyl or glass-paneled dome.  Still 8 lanes, no change there, just a reduction in the cost of the structure to fit within the funding.

Certainly not ideal, but hey – at least Morrisville is trying to make this work.  I still can’t believe they haven’t found a partner to help offset the funding short fall.  A local swim team, the Town of Cary, some group has to be able to help them make up the difference.

More details here:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/cary-news/article115152398.html

Almost a year after the town council was presented with Morrisville Aquatic and Fitness Center renovation options, finally an update! If you recall, in March 2015 Morrisville was presented with renovation options that were all well above the 2012 bond funding. The lowest cost renovation option was $6.5 million and the 2012 bond was approved at $5.7 million – $4 million of which was marked for the aquatic center. So Morrisville said they’d seek private partners to help cover the gap.

Now, almost a year later, it appears Morrisville didn’t find any partners. At the February 2016 town council meeting, a lower cost renovation option was presented. This one comes in at just under $5.7 million. It appears the original $1.7 million in the bond intended for Morrisville Community Park will now also go to the aquatic center (hey – no argument here).

But still no definite movement. Mayor pro-tem Steve Rao said a final decision on the aquatic center renovation plan could occur in the spring. The “could” is a bit worrisome given the “speed” of this project so far. Rao then said that even if they did approve the plan, the start of the renovation was still at least a year or two away. Not encouraging.

I’ve said this once before and I’ll say it again. Morrisville and Cary should partner on these renovations. The location of the pool is so close to Cary it’s almost in Cary. The proximity to NW Cary fills a huge aquatics needs that’s completely underserved now. Cary could contribute the funds required to make this the kind of facility it needs to be and then both Cary and Morrisville would have an amazing facility to use. My fear now is that Morrisville is so concerned with cost that they’ll build another completely inadequate pool (like the one they have now).

Morrisville considers less expensive renovations for aquatic and fitness center

This weekend the family and I visited the Homestead Aquatic Center in Chapel Hill.  I view the Homestead Aquatic Center as possibly the best example of a smaller aquatic center that serves the community tremendously well.  Here’s why:

• Lap pool is a perfect size at 25 yards by 25 meters.  It’s depth is at most 9 feet and it’s shallow end is 4 feet.  This is the perfect size for swim practice, high school swim meets, and small USA Swimming meets.
• Deck Space is just enough for swim meets without being so big that it becomes an unnecessary cost.
• Instead of just building one pool, Chapel Hill had the foresight to build a second pool beside the lap pool for: kids, learn to swim, water aerobics, therapy, etc.  The pool has a large zero entry ramp perfect for kids not ready to explore the deep and others with accessibility needs.  The rest of the pool varies from a depth of 0 to 6 feet.
• Pool temperature is perfect.  Because the center has 2 pools, the lap/competition pool is at the correct temperature for swimming.  This is never the case at centers with just one pool because they have to accommodate other uses that require a higher temperature.  But Homestead has the second pool, and they keep it at a much higher temperature for the kids/water aerobics crowd.  So I was happy there, my kids were happy there, a win-win situation.
• The rest of the facility was just about perfect in size.  Reasonable locker rooms, some office space, a few multiple purpose rooms for meetings / gatherings.

The total cost for the facility was $6.5 million in 2009.  So in today’s dollars, roughly $7.2 million.  I mention these numbers because just last week the Town of Cary approved a downtown parking garage for $9.35 million (Town of Cary will pay $8.35 million).  That’s right, an almost 10 million dollar parking garage.  So while downtown Cary continues to be a money pit, the rest of Cary continues to do without amenities that could easily be met with less money than what’s being spent on downtown.  It’s frustrating to see such warped priorities.

One of the many downsides to not having a municipal pool in Cary is the higher cost to swim at pools provided by other organizations.  Unlike municipal pools, many of these organizations don’t even offer daily swim passes.  Instead they require you to be a monthly member – often with an initiation fee.  Of the pools in Cary, only three offer day passes: UNC Wellness at $10, Rex Wellness at $10, and Triangle Aquatic Center at $7.  That makes the average daily swim rate in Cary $9.  Compared with the municipal pools from the surrounding communities, Cary is more than twice as expensive.

Pool Daily Admission Rate

It’s actually cheaper to drive outside of Cary to another city’s pool and swim at their non-resident rate (except for Durham at $9 for non-residents).  So while Cary likes to brag about their lowest tax rate in the area, they fail to mention it comes at the cost of fewer municipal services and resources.  While this may not be a big burden for certain demographics of Cary, it does present a large barrier to entry for many others.  In doing so, access to pools is restricted, fewer people learn to swim and/or enjoy the many health benefits of swimming.

It can be difficult to measure the quality of a pool. Do you do it by size, age, water temperature, etc?  When I’m traveling and looking for a pool where I can workout, the thing I look for is whether a USA Swim team practices there.  For a USA Swim team to practice effectively at a given facility, the pool must meet some minimum criteria regarding size, water temperature, and anti-wake properties.  So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at pools in the Triangle where USA Swim teams practice.  Thankfully, the USA Swimming site makes that pretty easy to do.  Here are the results.

Swim team members will typically travel farther than lap swimmers, learn to swim participants, or other recreational swimmers. For this reason, the map above uses a standard 5-mile service area radius for participants on a USA Swim Team.

As you can see from the map, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill are all well covered by USA Swim Teams. Town of Cary is partially covered by clubs at three pools in Cary: Cary Family YMCA, Cary Swim Club, and Triangle Aquatic Center. Cary Family YMCA provides the bulk of the partial coverage for central and western Town of Cary. It should be noted, however, that the club at Cary Family YMCA does not offer practices for the 3 highest levels of the program: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. For those, you have to travel to Raleigh.

So why isn’t central and western Cary better served by USA Swim teams?  The simple fact is that there aren’t any decent pools in that area.  The Cary Family YMCA pool is an older pool and it’s bubbled in the winter.  And that’s the best pool in that area other than the UNC Wellness Center which was not designed to accommodate a team (no deck space, starting blocks, or desire to rent lanes).  Clearly these two areas could greatly benefit from a new pool and the new pool would have no competition attracting USA Swimming clubs wanting to rent lanes.  This is where Town of Cary should step up and provide a quality facility for its citizens so they don’t have to drive all over the Triangle to find a decent pool.

Town of Cary has grown leaps and bounds over the past 3 decades.  A reasonable question might be, does Cary have the population to support a public pool?  Here are some population stats from other Triangle cities followed by public pools in these cities.