Mayor Stiles attended the School Board meeting on April11, 2017. The meeting was important for him as the School Board voted on whether or not to put a new pool to a vote this spring.
The City of Big Sandy and the School Board have invested lots of time and Rotary has funded a study regarding a new pool.
“The Tuesday meeting went well,” said Mayor Stiles. “There were lots of people, and lots of questions were asked. The Board voted to put the pool to a vote of the people.”
That election is going to be a mail in ballot. Ballots will go out on June 12 and must be back at the school no later than 8pm on June 29.
The Mayor said that ballots can be mailed back or hand carried to the school.
The Mayor noted that some rural people had many questions at the meeting. One of the big questions was can the pool be scaled back.
“The pool we have now is too small,” said Mayor Stiles. “If we expect the community to grow at all we don’t want to scale back.”
The plans will change from what is seen now. The Mayor said that if the pool becomes a reality there are changes that will have to be made to stay within the budget.
“Bleachers will probably go and I don’t think there will be a place for concessions in the new pool,” added Mayor Stiles. “We are going to have to stay within the guidelines of the money we have voted on to make the pool a reality.”
Mayor Stiles is the first to say that the pool has a long list of pros but it has some cons as well.
With parts of the south side of the town sinking away, maybe another place would be a better location for the pool than the Miley campus.
“We have five places in town where we have lots of underground water this time of year. We have studied the situation and we know there are no leaks to our system so the water is coming up from swampy underground areas,” said Mayor Stiles. “We have had contractors look at remedies. They are very expensive and there is no guarantee that they will solve the problem.”
The Mayor said there is not money enough in the budget to begin to fix the roads by tearing them down and getting rid of the water underneath.
But Mayor Stiles did say
See Page 3: Pool that he has been thinking of an approach using perforated pipe and culverts that just might help greatly. That approach is still on the drawing board for now.
One thing that Mayor Stiles did say about a new pool in that area is that a high water table has been thought about by architects already and if the pool were to be built on the other side of town near the cemetery, there are water problems over there as well.
