NewCanaanite.com received the following letter. Send letters to editor@newcanaanite.com.
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The post below is the contents of a letter Friends of Valles, a 93-member group of New Canaan Y members in support of keeping the Valles Pool, sent to the New Canaan YMCA Board of Directors on Friday evening, June 5. It had multiple authors as the group contributed to it. I am submitting it.
Over the past few weeks, the YMCA leadership’s long-standing neglect of its aquatic programs and desire to demolish the invaluable Valles Pool has come to public attention — not because leadership chose to involve the community in its decision making, but because concerned members of the aquatics community forced the issue.
According to a recent letter from Margaret Riley, the Y’s Executive Director, the Board has been considering this decision for approximately three years, with a final vote likely in coming months.
Yet YMCA members were only notified and surveyed two days ago – and that, after significant public outcry exemplified by a petition at SaveVallesPool.com that surpassed 1,000 signatures in roughly 36 hours. The executive director’s letter describes community input as the “final step” in this decision-making process and asks for our input.
The letter shows a lack of imagination about what the YMCA aquatics center could be and of its irreplaceable role in facilitating local water sports for the New Canaan school system and broader public. The YMCA should not become a Planet Fitness or a yoga studio – facilities that are available broadly elsewhere in the community.
The letter makes other several claims that do not hold up to scrutiny:
- The engineering report is unavailable and unverifiable. A report cited in the letter estimates repair costs at several million dollars over one to two years. This report has not been made public and cannot be independently vetted. When asked, the Y leadership has declined to share it with community members — including those with relevant civil engineering experience. Without access to this report, members are being asked to take a position with no meaningful information on which to base it. The Board must release this report publicly before any vote can be taken validly.
- The timeline raises serious questions. If the engineering study was conducted three years ago, why are members only being informed now? The letter states that the Valles building will “need to be closed by the end of the year.” How can that be the case when any change in use of the building will affect the Y’s Special Permit? The Y will have to go back to Planning & Zoning with a new Special Permit application. That process will take months, if not a year, before the Y can go for Building Permits. Why shutter the Valles Pool in December, with no plan for going forward, if the Y can’t even break ground for another year? Notably, even repairing the roof would require a Building Permit, and no such application has been filed — raising the question of whether the YMCA ever seriously intended to pursue repairs.
- Repurposing costs are not addressed. The letter quantifies the cost of repairing the pool but is silent on the cost of repurposing the space, which would likely be substantially greater. Members deserve a full accounting of both options before a vote. Related, if the pool is demolished and replaced by yoga and group exercise studios, the Y will not get a dime in capital support from the hundreds of swimming families. Alienating hundreds of member families at a time the Y needs a major capital campaign is financially imprudent.
- Usage data is selectively presented. The letter cites pool usage patterns to suggest it is uniquely underutilized during off-peak hours, while citing demand for exercise classes and gym equipment as justification for reallocation. But this dynamic almost certainly applies across all facility spaces — those areas are likely equally crowded in evenings and quiet during working hours. The pool is not an outlier. A more meaningful measure would be total participant hours across all spaces. Has that analysis been done and, if so, why hasn’t it been shared? Also, given that the Y is not offering programming in the Valles Pool during most of the day, nor staffing it with lifeguards, of course it is underutilized.
- The needs assessment is incomplete. The letter references a community needs assessment identifying demand for “low-pressure, non-competitive spaces” and services around chronic disease support, social isolation, and mental health. These are worthy issues for our community, but is the YMCA the right provider for these services, or would community members be better served by specialized organizations with specific expertise in these areas? Existing community spaces, including the New Canaan Library, were designed with inclusive, low-pressure programming in mind. (The pools implicitly bring about mental and physical well-being and provide a strong community among those who use them.) Meanwhile, the YMCA is the only facility in New Canaan capable of supporting a diving team. The choice between competitive aquatics and recreational programming is a false one. Lane lines can be moved; time blocks can be allocated. The NCHS swim team has won the Connecticut State championship four of the last six years. Such excellence does not happen without dedicated facilities, and it would be lost.
- The proposed alternative uses do not justify this tradeoff. Many of the suggested uses for the repurposed space — multi-purpose program rooms, expanded space for Bouncing Bears, an Adaptive Support Studio (why would the Y want to be in this business) require only a standard building footprint. The Y already has the Wagner Room for multi-purpose programming; the letter does not make the case for why additional space is needed. Moreover, such uses could be replicated in many locations around town. The pool cannot be. Greenwich High School is currently undertaking a nearly $60 million construction project to build a comparable aquatics facility. We already have this asset. Why is the Y deviating from a core historical competency of aquatic programming to venture into diversified mental health service offerings where it has no such demonstrated competency and which bring as yet unknown costs?
- One proposed use of the repurposed space is smaller pools dedicated to swim lessons and aquatic exercise — activities that can already take place in Valles today, simply by repositioning lane lines. The Y has offered no explanation as to why it is not currently offering such expanded offerings in its existing larger Valles Pool but would do so if it has smaller ones. The YMCA once offered scuba diving classes in Valles during evening hours using the same flexible setup. Competitive swimming, diving, and synchronized swimming require regulation-sized pools. Fairfield County has only approximately 12–15 such indoor pools, making Valles a genuinely scarce regional resource. Without the Valles diving well specifically, there will be no diving team — not just for New Canaan, but for Darien and Sacred Heart athletes who currently train there because no other options exist closer than New Haven.
- The survey process is inadequate. Members were given an extremely short window — just a few days — to respond to a survey with no accompanying opportunity for open discussion with affected parties. Given that this decision has reportedly been under consideration for three years, the brevity of this “input” period further suggests that the outcome has already been determined.
The Board should seriously consider whether treating community input as an afterthought is appropriate for a nonprofit whose mission is to serve that community. When it takes a grassroots campaign and sustained public pressure to prompt leadership to solicit member opinions — and even then, the window for input is a matter of days — the failure to uphold organizational values is meaningful and not a procedural oversight.
We ask the Board to delay any vote until the engineering report is made public, independent review is completed, and a genuine community dialogue can take place.
Leslie Pratch