The very idea of a public swimming pool in Cranston just can’t seem to catch a break – unless it’s a broken pipe of unknown origin that sends opening day down the drain again.
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The very idea of a public swimming pool in Cranston just can’t seem to catch a break – unless it’s a broken pipe of unknown origin that sends opening day down the drain again.
As recently as late December, city officials – long under pressure to reopen the Budlong Pool, which closed in 2020 after decades of high use followed by deterioration – said the goal was to replace the pool with a smaller version ready for swimming by July 1.
Now, that date appears to be tentative if not unlikely, a possible casualty of a mystery drainpipe.
Monday night’s City Council meeting included an update in the Budlong saga: Engineers from the city’s Department of Public Works and outside firms are trying to figure out the origin of a blocked drainpipe found during excavation that does not appear on any available site plans.
A “scoping” procedure was scheduled for this Thursday in hopes that images might provide a clue to the former role of the blocked pipe, administration Chief of Staff Anthony Moretti told the council Monday night.
Demolition of the old pool is finished, Moretti said, but excavation has continued to prepare the site for construction and the drainpipe has stopped that work in its tracks – and will raise the project cost while the city devises a solution.
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TruthTeller2024
The wrecking ball now needs to be aimed at City Hall. There is one word for what needs to happen next: "recall."
Wednesday, March 26 Report this
krosenberg46
It's hard not to be very skeptical of anything this administration says about the pool because of their documented history of misrepresentations over the past 4 years.
City records obtained through public record requests make it clear that the administration rushed into the decision to demolish and replace the pool without reasonable due diligence. Long after they had already spent well over a quarter million dollars on plans for the new pool, the city's plans had to undergo a historic review with the RI Commission on Historic Preservation (as a condition of tapping a $.75M federal grant the city got for the new pool. The Commission researched the history of the pool. I obtained their documentation, which explains that the pool originally was fed by Blackamore Pond (which may well explain the pipe that was found.) The original structure and past modifications to the pool were recorded and the Commission was able to unearth those records. If this project wasn't done in such an a**-backward fashion, one would think the pool engineers would have looked into all of this thoroughly before the project went forward.
Wednesday, April 9 Report this