Onondaga Community College decides to close pool because it's too expensive to maintain

Syracuse.com reported that Onondaga Community College pool will close for good as a cost-cutting measure. As the article relates:

“I would be a lost soul if I weren’t able to continue what I started so many years ago,” Dekleermaeker said recently in the locker room after an afternoon swim. “It would be a disaster if it closed, not just for me but for many other people.”

Those people include thousands of OCC students and area children who learned to swim and dive in the college pool, and the teachers and lifeguards who have spent decades at the poolside.

“When I look at the families coming here for swim lessons, we’ve had more than 1,000 in the past year,” said Beth Maio, who runs the community swimming program. “This pool has been open for, what, 30 years? The number of people that have taken swim lessons here in this pool, I couldn’t even guess.”

The college announced last month it will close the pool at the end of the spring semester because it had simply gotten too expensive, while state aid to OCC has declined. It costs about $250,000 a year to run and maintain the pool, officials said, and the college would have to spend about $500,000 to install a dehumidifier system.

“We did a careful analysis which resulted in a decision not to re-open the pool,” said OCC President Debbie Sydow.

Bill Emm, the college’s chief financial officer, said the pool building will house heating and ventilation equipment for the arena being built next door and for office space and classrooms. Read more here.