DE PERE, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – De Pere voters in November decided they wanted to keep and rebuild a pair of swimming pools in the city.
The pools are on each side of the Fox River – the VFW on the west side of De Pere, near Grant Street, the Legion on the east side, near Webster.
The community Thursday now got one step closer to getting those two new pools.
The Board of Park Commissioners reviewed possible pool designs for the VFW and Legion pools.
“Citizens got out there, the ‘Save Legion Pool’ folks got out there, the community rallied behind that,” said board member Randy Soquet. “We had a referendum in the fall, and we’re going to go with two pools.”
The board was presented with two different designs for each location – a base option, including all of the “must haves” and requirements by the board, like diving boards, lap pools and zero depth entries, as well as an alternate option, featuring amenities the public said they’d like to see, such as a climbing wall and water slide complex.
Patrick Skalecki is the project manager and tells FOX 11….
“Our direction is really to utilize the feedback we got Monday at the open house and today from the Park Board, as well as whatever speaking public will be here, we’ll be developing it into a single option at each location.”
For both VFW and Legion, the base option would cost a little over $6 million. The alternate options? Approximately $8 million each.
With a hefty price tag like that, board members say they felt the public should be involved with the rebuilding process as much as possible.
“The public has had input along the way,” Soquet said.
“We’ve had open houses, we’ve had surveys online, citizen members have come to our monthly park board meetings and provided input for us, so we feel really confident that we’ve received a lot of input from the public throughout this process.”
Even with the $900,000 per year tax levy increase approved by voters, the board said it’s still not enough to cover even the base design options.
Ultimately, the board decided for VFW, they’d go with a modified version of the more expensive option.
For Legion, a modified version of the base option.
The board said representatives from GRAEF will be back next month to present renderings showing the modifications made.
