We are a week from the Crystal Pool referendum and I thought I would write one more article about it. If you haven’t read either of my first two articles you can read them here and here. In the first article, I went through a little of the history of how we got here and showed how there had been little consideration of completing a refurbishment rather than a replacement. In the second article, I looked at an example of a pool in Edmonton that is being refurbished for considerably less money than we are spending on replacement. In this article I am going to dive into a pool that I am very familiar with, Winskill Aquatic & Fitness Centre.

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As long time readers will know, I grew up in Tsawwassen, that small town that you drive by as soon as you are off the ferry. As a child, I was an avid swimmer, and while I may have had a few lessons before my family lived in Tsawwassen, it was at Winskill pool that I really learned to swim and excelled at it. I took pretty much all of my Red Cross lessons there and I was a member of the the local swim team (I will say that I was never a super fast member). I was at Winskill pool all the time. In comparison to Crystal pool, it was definitely smaller and did only had 25m lanes. Still, I loved it as a kid. I didn’t see its limitations, though I can imagine in the intervening 30 years since I have been there, it has likely aged. The municipal government in Delta, seems to think so too and are embarking on a complete rebuild of the pool at pretty much the same time that we are looking at Crystal Pool in Victoria. Many people that read my last article noted that comparing our project to one in Alberta was not completely fair, as projects there would not have to be built under the same building code and in particular would not have to meet the same earthquake standards. The new Winskill Aquatic & Fitness Centre will have to meet the same standards, and yet they are building a centre that is roughly the same size (slightly bigger) and it is estimated to cost $80 million less than the cheapest option, and over a $100 million less than the Caledonia option, that are being presented to Victoria voters.

Winskill pool sits within Winskill park, just south of the main town centre of Tsawwassen. The park is about 20 acres in size, which is a third bigger than the just under 15 acres of Central Park in Victoria. As it stands now, and did when I was a kid, Winskill Park is made up of a number of baseball diamonds, a soccer field and a large frisbee golf course (Tsawwassen was way ahead of the Gulf Island craze for this sport I think). The project to replace the pool includes building a completely new pool in a different location of the park and a complete reimagining of the entire 20 acre space. Like the South and Caledonia options in Victoria, the construction in a new location will allow the current building to stay open until the new pool is ready. The park project alone is massive, with the addition of new baseball diamonds (that will remove the frisbee golf course), a new large public plaza, a new surface parking lot, and the new pool building.

The new Winskill aquatic centre will be much larger than the current one, with three large pools including a 25m lap pool, a 25m teaching pool, and a large leisure pool with a beach, lazy river and a waterslide. There will also be a cold plunge pool and a hot tub. Beyond the pool there will be a gymnasium, a fitness centre, multi-purpose rooms, a sauna and more. Really all you could want in a recreation centre. The municipality of Delta is working with Dialog (the Centennial Square redesign firm) on the project and have somehow come up with a budget of $130 million or as I pointed out earlier, $80 million less than the cheapest option that is being presented to Victoria voters on February 8th. And the cost to Delta includes an entire makeover of a 20 acre park too. Given that Winskill is being built in the same earthquake zone and to the same building standards, it isn’t due to the nature of the construction. Nor is it due to the building being much smaller, as I said the building is slightly larger than the one proposed for Victoria (89k sqft vs 81k sqft in Victoria).

The two main differences that I can see between the two pools are that Winskill does not have a 50m pool, which given the other amenities it does have seems less than required, and it doesn’t have underground parking, something that is not needed in Victoria. The proposed underground parking here, goes against the push that City Council in Victoria has been making when it comes to residential building where many buildings have been approved with no parking and in one instance in the last few years, where council has actually told a developer to reduce the parking in a project. Additional parking also goes against the push to reduce the carbon footprint of the new building. The current parking in North Park is limited, but that encourages people to look for other methods of getting there and the limitation has not lowered the usage of the current pool which is nearly always busy. If more parking in the area is needed, simply removing some of the residential parking zones would be an easy fix (of course I am quite biased on residential parking only zones).

Given the massive difference in cost between these two projects and yet the similarities in the final product, I think it clearly shows that our project does not have an appropriate cost figure and that the project needs to be reconsidered and put back to the City and more importantly, to the residents who will have to pay for it. My preference is for a refurbishment, but if that doesn’t work, than something cheaper that will not have as big a negative impact on other programs in the City. As Delta is showing us, this is clearly possible.

Let me know what you think. Is the additional $80 million dollar cost of our pool over the Winskill project justified? Let me know in the comments.