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In Our View, Feb. 2: Sad News in Hough

Neighborhood pool will close; foundation seeking new community use for building

The Columbian
Published: February 2, 2010, 12:00am

For more than a decade the residents of the Hough community in West Vancouver have been served, strengthened and connected by their neighborhood pool. It’s not the biggest or the fanciest, but no one has ever doubted to whom the Hough Pool belongs.

The neighborliness that folks find in the pool is traced to its origin, which was not through some bureaucratic bounty of a municipality but through the generosity of a big-hearted community giant. Paul Christensen and the nonprofit Hough Foundation built the pool in 1997 and deeded it to the city of Vancouver. Maintenance and upkeep became such a demand on the city that the pool was returned to the foundation in 2003. A Feb. 27 Columbian editorial that year declared — in what now has become a painful prophecy — that “the Hough Foundation should be commended for keeping (the pool) alive a while longer.”

Sadly, that while longer will end on Feb. 28 when the pool closes. The first culprit is the grinding, ruthless economic recession. As Scott Hewitt reported in Saturday’s Columbian, Christensen’s real estate company Realvest filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that has forced the Hough Foundation to close the pool and concentrate on other charitable efforts.

It was good to see in a foundation statement that the nonprofit will continue “protecting valuable resources for our scholastic, mental health and counseling services in the Hough community.” Painful as the pool closing will be, swimming takes a back seat to those three endeavors when it comes to philanthropic priorities.

A second reason for closing the pool was its failure to lift user-fee contributions to more than 42 percent of the budget. Other public pools typically recoup up to two-thirds of operating costs through user fees and rental revenue.

A third reason for the demise of Hough Pool is its soaring costs of maintenance and upkeep. Several upgrades, each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, have been necessary in recent years.

Swimming opportunities have increased in areas nearby. The city’s Marshall Community Center pool, on the other side of Interstate 5 and about a half-mile from the Hough neighborhood, was expanded and renovated a few years ago. And the Washington State School for the Blind last year opened its Kennedy Fitness Center, with a state-of-the art swimming pool, the largest of its kind in Southwest Washington. The center is about a mile from the Hough neighborhood.

And with the opening of other private pools in Vancouver in recent years, there are plenty of venues available. Still, it won’t be the same for the Hough neighbors who came to love their own special place to meet, fellowship, swim, paddle off a few pounds and stay in shape. For many of those people, that opportunity was within walking distance of home. And the pool’s proximity adjacent to Hough Elementary School formed a community campus of sorts for students, parents and teachers.

The future of the pool building is uncertain, but we trust the Hough Foundation will find a suitable, more efficient use that will benefit the community. Among the possibilities is converting the pool to a gymnasium. Foundation Executive Director Kate Sacamano said, “This was an incredibly important asset to the community, and we are already receiving calls from longtime users who are very disappointed.” Perhaps a new community-service mission for the building will console folks in the Hough neighborhood.

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