Not too late for change of Hart

I am writing regarding the Friday, Jan. 19 story “Pool petition won’t float, mayor says.”

Mayor Lynn Hall says it is too late to change plans now and use part of the loan approved to build a pool on the Hart instead of downtown and says the city is already committed to buy the Days Inn hotel for $4.5 million.

I wonder when or why city council did this? Normally they would find out if the Days Inn was willing to sell for this amount and then have a vote at city council to decide to purchase.

Before I started the petition on the Hart about two weeks ago, I called city hall and was assured that no action had yet taken place with respect to the loan approval for the fire hall and pool and this issue would be dealt with by council, sometime in the new year.

Also, in an editorial about the referendum in the Sept. 29, 2017 Citizen, editor-in-chief Neil Godbout pointed out that a positive referendum vote would allow the city to borrow $15 million for a new fire hall and $35 million for a pool. He declared that a successful referendum result did not tie the city down to location, nor how the money would be spent. He said that council could decide to build the pool in College Heights and to renovate the downtown fire hall. Now Lynn Hall seems to indicate how this loan money must be spent is written in stone.

When my son Paul was collecting completed petition papers, he spoke with a young man who said that if there had been a pool in the Hart when he was younger, he might not have gotten into the trouble he did earlier in life. Of course, for city council to make downtown attractive so tourists will come is not wrong. If we had a new pool, perhaps with sandy beaches and wave action, it might draw visitors. But another vision is for having a neighborhood pool, not with frills but to provide easier access for young girls and boys to go and join a swim club for competitive swimming. Could it be that less young people would get into trouble with drugs and alcohol because of this?

So very few people voted in the referendum that only nine per cent of the eligible voters voted in favour of borrowing this money for a pool. This means that 91 per cent of eligible voters did not endorse the city’s borrowing for the pool. With such a slight mandate, one might think that the mayor and city council could be open to hear the plea from many people on the Hart for a pool there. Svend Serup, Prince George