Decades after first envisioned, community still without pool despite years of fundraising

If you’ve spent enough time in Scappoose, you’ve probably heard some form of the question, “Where’s the pool already?”

There have been numerous starts and stops since conversations first began in earnest about how to bring a pool facility to town. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when those talks started, but since at least the 1950s, Scappoose residents have regularly taken up the cause of getting their town its own community pool.

But decades later — with myriad fundraisers bringing in thousands of dollars — there is still no pool.

A 2.5-acre piece of property purchased for around $674,000 by the city in late 2010 for the sole purpose of one day housing such a facility, sits empty at the corner of Havlik Road and 2nd Street. Scappoose swimmers, including the High School swim team, continue to make the drive to St. Helens to use the Eisenschmidt Pool.

But City Councilor Judie Ingham, who has worked toward development of a swimming pool since the mid-1990s, said she expects city leaders to again dive into pool talks, even if it’s not the most pressing matter at hand.

“Right now, with budgetary constraints, it is not a priority. I wish the pool was at the top of the list,” she said. “We’ve all been waiting a long, long time.”

Year after year, the city continues to carry over more than $230,000 of dedicated tax dollars that remains from money collected after the passage of a 1998 pool ordinance. Flaws discovered in the ordinance later caused the city to halt tax collection on that front, but the money remains, collecting interest until it can be spent on its initial purpose.

Few hear the “where’s the pool?” question more than Carolynn Collie, in charge of a nearly $32,000 pool fund made up of money raised in the community since 1970.

The privately maintained Bob Casswell Memorial Swim Pool Fund was created that year, named after Collie’s father and looked over by her mother Vivian Urie until her death in 2008 at the age of 78.

Casswell took on the pool cause in 1970 with Urie after he rescued a child swept away in the Columbia River current. The couple believed a community pool — and the swimming education that would surely result for kids — were needed to stop such incidents. However, at a city meeting on that same topic, Casswell suffered a heart attack and died.

“Everywhere I go, in every store I go into, they ask,” Collie, a former high school swim coach, said about residents’ queries regarding the pool money.

Collie said none of the money in the account has been spent, despite some beliefs to the contrary.

That wasn’t the only pool-related fund created over the years. Collie said the now-defunct nonprofit Scappoose Community Swim Council had raised its own money, much less than what is in the Casswell fund.

She said the Swim Council is in the process of being dissolved and state officials are helping her combine the council’s pool fund with the Casswell fund in a public trust account.

Scappoose City Manager Jon Hanken said in recent months he has been contacted by representatives from the Oregon Department of Justice with questions related to the Casswell fund and the separate swimming pool line item in the city’s budget. Hanken presumes someone in the community complained to the state agency regarding money raised over the years, and held in a private account, for the non-existent pool.

He said he is unsure as to what spurred the state’s look into the pool funds, which he adamantly states are not related to the city.

“Nothing has happened to the funds,” Hanken said. “There is no conspiracy.”

The state Department of Justice did not respond to The Spotlight’s queries on this matter by press time.

Besides the obvious complexities of pulling together the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would take to build an indoor pool facility, Hanken said one of the reasons it’s been so difficult to bring a pool to town is that nearly everyone he speaks with on the topic has a different idea of what the facility should be.

“I can ask 50 different people what this pool looks like and I can get 50 different answers,” he said.

There’s also the fickle fact of money.

Ingham envisions a public-private partnership is the way to go, taking the brunt of costs out of the city’s hands, especially in costly maintenance.

Hanken said a lengthy, presumably multi-year, public process, including discussions related to a bond measure or operational levy, would be needed to even get to the point of seeing the pool dreams become reality.

“I hope to have it done before I retire,” Hanken said.

Until then, it appears the pool question will remain just as it has for half a century.

“A lot of kids that are now in their 50s and 60s, they ask the question,” Collie said about student-led efforts over the years to collect money for a pool. “'We raised money, what happened?’”