Making long-range plans for the expansion of the John Vanderzicht Memorial Pool facility, members of the North Whidbey Parks and Recreation District will be exploring the possibility of creating a capital expansion surcharge and donation program.

Commissioner Tom Johnson proposed the idea of creating such a funding program at the district’s December meeting.

Under Johnson’s proposal, the burden of funding for possible expansion sometime in the future would be placed only on those persons who use the pool and interested members of the community rather than requesting the district’s taxpayers to fund the project.

Johnson proposed placing a pool user capital expansion surcharge of five percent on all user fees.

“This surcharge will remain in place until the capital expansion program is completed, plus one year to insure that adequate operating and maintenance funds are available to sustain the new expansion,” he said. “If at that time adequate aquatic revenue funding is available, then the surcharge will either be eliminated or reduced as appropriate.”

Under Johnson’s proposal, all the money from donations and the surcharge would be placed in a special fund to be used only for capital expansion.

“Donations could come from pledges, or from people who want to leave money to the capital expansion program in their wills, or from direct donations,” Johnson said.

To get things in motion, Johnson gave pool director Craig Carlson a check for $1,000 and said he has already ear-marked half of the money from his will to the pool.

At a previous meeting, commissioners approved creating a “foundation” for obtaining funds for pool expansion, but discovered there was no need for creating such a foundation.

Carlson said a separate fund could be created without the need for a foundation to oversee funding.

Chairman Harvey Prosser said he was opposed to the idea of a “special fund” because it involved taxpayer money being earmarked for something other than overall pool operations.

Johnson and Carlson tried to explain that no taxpayer money would be involved, it would all come from donations or a surcharge on people using the pool.

Prosser said he still thought something wasn’t right with the proposed plan.

Carlson said he would do some checking to see if he could come up with any additional information and commissioners decided to table any further discussion on the idea until the district’s next meeting.

In other business, Carlson reported the pool facility had suffered a break-in.

“This happened sometime during the night of Dec. 18 or in the early morning hours of Dec. 19,” he said.

The suspects broke a window to gain entry and stole the pool’s cash drawer.

“There was no money in the drawer and the only real damage done was the broken window,” Carlson said. “I reported the incident to the police and they took a report. They told me there has been a series of break-ins around town in recent days.”

At the time of the break-in the pool’s security cameras, for some reason, were not turned on.

Johnson recommended that the pool install an external alarm system with a flashing light that would be activated if a break-in should happen.

“The light and alarm should be installed on the west side of the building so it could be seen and heard by the firemen who man the station next to us 24/7,” he said. “I would also recommend that we make sure the security cameras are working.”

Carlson also reported that one of the pool’s kayaks has come up missing.

“We don’t know when it was taken, but Pete Stevens, our kayak instructor reported one is gone,” Carlson said. “We presume it has been stolen, but we don’t know when. Pete discovered it missing in mid-October and he said this is the first time one has been lost in 12 years.”

Carlson said the pool has so many kayaks, they are forced to keep some of them in a fenced-in area outside the building.

“We did some checking to see if someone might have borrowed it and not brought it back, and this is the reason for the delay in reporting the loss to Oak Harbor police,” he said. “We now have all the kayaks secured with a cable.”

Persons using the pool in November was listed as being 6,978 and Carlson said this figure was down a little bit from previous years.

“The inclement weather had something to do with the lower numbers and we were closed due to a power outage on Nov. 19 and we had a snow closure on Nov. 28,” he said.