At their Feb. 16 meeting, Cache Creek council defeated a motion to ask for a report outlining options to determine a cost to replace the existing swimming pool with a new facility having the same features. Coun. Wendy Coomber and Coun. Lisa Dafoe voted in favour of it.

There was a lengthy discussion about the subject, with several council members acknowledging that the public needed to be consulted. However, no public meeting date was set, and questions about when such a meeting would take place went unanswered.

Coomber asked for the motion — which would have looked at options to cost out a replacement for the current swimming and tot/wading pools — to go on the agenda. The facility did not open in 2020, following a decision at a closed council meeting on March 23, 2020, and Coomber said she had been thinking about the pool a lot.“The conclusion I came to is we cannot fix the current pool. We need to either replace it or wave goodbye. It’s been a long time since the village has built anything of that kind of value, and it would be nice to leave something for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren: a beautiful new outdoor pool they can enjoy for a long time.”

Mayor Santo Talarico said he agreed with all the points raised, and acknowledged that the pool was an important part of the village’s recreational program. However, he said that a new pool was going to be “very, very expensive".

“We don’t even have our annual provisional budget complete yet [for 2021]. We don’t know where 2022 and 2023 even sit yet, so to ask administration to spend time to put together anything at this point is way premature; not until we get our 2021 provisional budget done and know where we sit in 2022 and 2023.

“Further, we have to consult with the public to see what they want for recreation. They might not even want a new public outdoor pool. They might want a new indoor pool. We don’t know that. We have to go into a public consultation process with recreation in general, for them to give their feedback to us. They’re the ones who are going to be paying the bill.”