Newtown’s Summer Swimming Options

Are Circling The Drain

Newtown’s Parks and Recreation officials are looking to the future, and the direction they are looking is Fairfield Hills. This week, Parks and Recreation Director Barbara Kasbarian said the town has a “desperate” need for a recreation center and that she and others working to fill that need are “waiting on the authority.” That would be the Fairfield Hills Authority.

When it comes to assessing the possibilities for a recreation center, however, the Fairfield Hills Authority has very little to work with. Beyond the concept itself, there are no specifications, no formal estimates of need, and no projections for public use of various components of the facility. The Parks and Recreation Commission does have a cost estimate. Last fall, the commission’s chairman stunned the Board of Selectmen with proposal for a recreation center with an estimated cost of $19 million to $23 million. The selectmen had been expecting a $5 million plan for a swimming pool to replace the Dickinson Park pool, which was filled in last March after it was ruled a health hazard. The commission clearly preferred to have the $5 million go toward a large recreation center at Fairfield Hills. The Board of Selectmen, with a $30 million-plus high school expansion project on the horizon, clearly preferred not to discuss a $23 million recreation center.

The only plan we have heard of to make up for the loss of the popular Dickinson Park pool is to open the postage-stamp-of-a-beach at Eichler’s Cove to swimmers… maybe next year. We have a hard time envisioning any configuration of that marina/swimming facility on Lake Zoar that would come close to accommodating the demand for a summer swimming facility.

The Parks and Recreation Commission has plans to use the Newtown High School pool this summer to accommodate both swimming lessons and hours will be extended for community swimming. But who wants to go indoors to swim on a hot summer day?

This, we believe, is the big flaw in the Parks and Recreation Commission’s preference for an indoor pool at Fairfield Hills over an additional outdoor facility. No one wants to sit inside in the summer, even if it is by a pool.

In the next three months, when temperatures push into the 90s and Newtown falls into its usual summer swelter, there will be nothing conceptual about frustration felt by local families in search of a place to swim. It will be specific and emphatic. We expect that the Treadwell Park pool, which is already crowded in hot weather, will routinely reach its capacity with a long line of cars packed with expectant kids and prayerful parents still at the gate. That’s what a desperate need looks like.

If the Parks and Recreation Commission, or the Board of Selectmen, or the Fairfield Hills Authority really want to take the pulse of the town on what recreational facilities should be given priority, we suggest that they volunteer to be the ones to turn people away at Treadwell Park this summer.