Outdoor Swimming Pool Renovation Analysis
Overview
The Lawrence Parks and Recreation department and its consultants performed an extensive community engagement process for the pool renovation that included 3 community-wide opinion surveys, 3 public meetings, 2 pop-up meetings, and 9 focus group meetings.
The Director of Parks and Recreation, Luis Ruiz, claimed that “the preferred option . . . has come up through that public engagement” process. The Aug 13 agenda item report claimed that the “Preferred Option [was] based on feedback” [pg. 2], and in public and focus group meetings, Parks and Rec representatives asserted that the pool renovation design concepts arose from the community’s survey responses.
In every stage of the community engagement process, our community requested open water for recreational swimming and retaining our 50m lap lanes. The Parks and Rec department, Municipal Services & Operations (MSO), and their consultants ignored this extensive community feedback and only put forth design concepts that dramatically reduced the size of our pool and its open swim space. These departments and their consultants also failed to fully and accurately share the community’s input with the City Commission, which made it appear as though the preferred design concept they presented was desired by our community.
One of the stated priorities for the pool renovation project was to “engage the community” using the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) standards [pg. 21]. The IAP2 states that public participation “includes the promise that the public's contribution will influence the decision.” The IAP2 Code of Ethics commits its practitioners to:
“incorporate the interests and concerns of all affected stakeholders,”
“undertake and encourage actions that build trust and credibility for the process among all the participants,”
“encourage the disclosure of all information relevant to the public's understanding and evaluation of a decision,” and
“ensure that stakeholders have . . . the opportunity to influence decisions.”
We believe the actions of the Parks and Rec department, Municipal Services & Operations (MSO), and their consultants did not comply with the IAP2's Code of Ethics for the reasons below. [Our full report includes sections with more details about each of these issues.]
Our community provided 5,749 comments in the opinion surveys, which was the primary way citizens could express their opinions about the pool renovation project. Vireo, the public engagement consultants, did not analyze these 5,749 comments and did not present information from these comments to the Commission to inform their decisions. Their reports did not mention that the surveys garnered these thousands of comments. and they did not properly publish the 3,028 comments from the second two surveys, hundreds of which expressed dissatisfaction with many elements of the proposed design plans. [Sections 1 & 3b]
The Parks and Recreation department did not indicate the square footage of the new and old pools in their public engagement materials, so no citizens knew how much water space we would lose in the proposed plans when our community participated in the opinion surveys or meetings. [Section 2]
Vireo’s final report didn’t give an accurate summary of the first opinion survey, which 1,651 people took. In its section about this survey, they incorrectly published the results from a meeting attended by 13 people instead of the survey results from 1,651 people. So the City Commission only saw summaries of results from 1,651 respondents in one slide at their June 4 meeting and did not receive accurate data from this survey at the Aug 13 meeting when they approved the preferred concept. [Section 3b]
The three surveys’ questions biased results by only giving people the option of voting for “open swim space” in 1 out of 25 questions, while they allowed people to vote for a “lazy river” in 5 out of 25 questions. [Section 3a]
Our community consistently indicated we wanted open swim space and long course lap lanes in the surveys’ multi-select questions, in hundreds of the surveys’ comments, and in the public engagement meetings, but this public opinion was ignored and not used to direct the renovation design concepts. [Sections 1b, 1c, 3c, 4a, 4c, & 6]
Two months after the preferred concept was approved, the Parks and Rec department finally presented the analysis of comments from 2 of the 18 questions that allowed comments. These results resoundingly show that our community requested a larger facility in their survey comments. [Section 1c]
The Parks and Rec department told our community that it would be too expensive to retain our open water space, but they had not actually analyzed these costs. When these costs were finally estimated, our community discovered that repairing our current pool would cost less than the preferred concept. [Section 5]
The engineering consultants do not appear to have shared with the City Commission and the public that the location of stormwater pipes may be the cause of the settling and cracking happening to the shallow end of our pool, and the consultants’ preferred design concept located the lazy river in the same location that may be causing these problems with our current pool. [Section 7]
Full Analysis of Omissions and Errors in Outdoor Pool Renovation Project