Greater Bay and our Lake Worth Pool

When you hire a project manager, you expect him to understand the project that he is managing and everything in the Contract. This is standard. That is what we pay him for—to be on top of every aspect of the project.

There are still some in this city, for whatever nutty reasons, take Greater Bay’s side of our beach redevelopment even though they never performed and never had any intent to perform. They even go so far as to claim that it was Greater Bay that discovered the grant timeline for the pool.

This is what someone said: Well, when Greater Bay told us of the Grant time problem, they also told us that the City had negotiated a construction schedule at the beach that called for the pool to be addressed well after the expiration date. So in the spirit of getting the money spent before the expiration date, City Staff and Greater Bay set out to address the problem.

That is then that they started to get help from the Western LandPlanners who insisted on returning the pool to days long expired when we had diving and other swimming events. Can we forget the righteous indignation at any attempt to explain that rules for swimming events required dramatic reconstruction of the pool that was well beyond the amount of grant money. Nor will we forget the insistence by the WLPs that we put in the diving boards and redo the hardscape around the pool so we could return to our historical past.

The above is fantasy. So, let's stick with the facts.

To put everyone’s mind to rest, the original Developer agreement signed on November 21, 2006 mentions the Grant. The construction schedule was Greater Bay’s. Everyone knew about the Grant: Greater Bay, City Staff and Cory O’Gorman. None of these ever brought the deadline to the forefront until time was running out. Where was Staff? Where was the Project Manager? In fact, on November 6, 2007, Peter Willard gave a presentation on the Florida Recreation Development Assistance Program Pool Grant. Mr. Willard didn’t first discover there was a Grant. He knew about it one year before!

At that meeting, the project manager’s contract was extended. Commissioner Jennings was the ONLY Commissioner that had good sense when she voted NAY. Clemens, Lowe, Golden and Vespo voted to continue on with O’Gorman’s company, Place Planning & Design that was supposed to be watching out for Lake Worth's interests.

The “western land planners,” as this writer calls them, had nothing to do with the desire of restoring the pool to attract swim meets. That was the vote and the will of the Commission although not the goal of Greater Bay’s. First, Willard wanted to demolish the pool because he said that “it was not structurally sound.” Then he suggested filling in the middle of the pool from 12 feet to 6 feet and have 3.5 feet at the shallow end which would have been too shallow for competitive swimming. In fact, these people wanted to demolish everything.

The “western land planners” had no desire to “return to our historical past” because we agreed with the Commission to renovate and design it so that we could bring in money to our City by attracting national swim meets. National meets bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

FACTS:

• We never had national meets at the Lake Worth pool from inception.

• We never bid for a national meet.

• We never had the facility for a national meet.

• Therefore, there was no historic past as charged by the above critic.
  

All in all, we allowed Greater Bay back on our property for the pool renovation against the advice of our city attorney and now look at what we have. A pool closed indefinitely because of shoddy work and an inferior filtration system along with a myriad of other costly problems.