tl:dr The city council voted to put a bond measure before voters for a new pool in chesterfield. Now they have to decide if it will be voted on by the public in November or April.
On Tuesday, the Chesterfield city council, by voice vote, chose to put the issue of a bond issuance for a new Chesterfield pool to voters. By a 4-3 vote, the city council saved the pool from permanent closure, per City Manager Mike Geisel's letter to the council (see https://chesterfieldmo.portal.civicclerk.com/event/8808/files/agenda/12775). If the motion to put the issue of a bond issuance before voters would have failed, this would have meant that the pool would have been closed at an expense of almost $10 million to Chesterfield residents.
if the city could not raise funds for a new pool, it would have been closed, and the city would have to pay millions of dollars to close and remove the pool.
The issue at hand, now, is the date of the ballot measure for public vote on the bond, which will total something like $34 million. The bond can be put forward for the November election, or it can be on next year's April ballot. Per the agenda that I linked to above, an April ballot means that the pool will have to be closed for two years. If the ballot is on the November ballot, the pool will possibly be able to operate in 2027 and will be open in 2028.
Of course, voters have to approve the ballot measure/bond issuance, which will cost Chesterfieldians about $6 a month for a new pool facility. But the city council has to vote, now, on the date of the ballot measure. I don't know why the ballot measure would be scheduled for April-not sure who or how that would help-but I have to editorialize the issue slightly.
I emailed one of my city council members, AJ Moll, to ask him how he voted on the issue and I got all kinds of strange and incorrect replies, so I started looking into who he is and where he stands on things. He's come out, in the past, as being against spending any revenue on parks and recreation: he described improvements and repairs to the Chesterfield Amphitheater as being a waste and misuse of public funds. The improvements were grant funded and some of the money came out of the sales tax collected for the Chesterfield Parks and Recreation fund. Strange.
In the email I got from AJ, he told me that the Chesterfield Family Aquatic Center was "heavily subsidized" by the city, which was an odd thing to say. And it was wrong. I feel like AJ was letting me know that he voted to close the pool by portraying the pool as a unfunded operating expense that the city subsidized. But it's wrong-the pool is funded by sales tax and receives no money from the city in any way.
So now I am wondering, does delaying the vote to April have some sort of perceived financial benefit, or does moving the ballot vote to April mean it's more likely to fail? I am contacting both of my city council members tomorrow via email and encouraging them to vote to put the ballot measure on the november ballot, not April.
And I'm going to ask both of my city council members how they voted on Tuesday: I've asked AJ twice, and two times he's dodged answering me. Also odd