Honea Path offers county’s last public pool

June 21--Honea Path bills itself as The Little Town with a Big Heart.

It's also the only town in Anderson County with a public pool.

The 67-year-old Chiquola Pool on Arkansas Street requires 350,000 gallons of water, a lot of chemicals, and a daily dose of good fortune.

"We've had good luck with it so far," Honea Path Mayor Earl Meyers said Thursday.

A new addition this year is a hydraulic lift that enables older adults to enjoy the concrete pool, which was built by Daniel Construction in 1947. An adult water aerobics class began June 10, and continues two mornings a week at the Olympic-size pool, which is open from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Admission is $2.50.

"It gets expensive to keep it going. We've made a lot of changes over the years; we had to put in a new filtration system a few years ago," Meyers said. "Our people love it, so we'll try to keep it going as long as we can. It's the last pool in operation in the county -- that I know."

That became the official Thursday, when Pelzer officials confirmed the closing of their pool after 32 years of operation.

"I hated to see it close," said Brad West, now the town's lead maintenance technician and a lifeguard when the pool opened in 1981. "But it was simply a matter of finances.

West, a certified pool operator, also said, "We lost money on it every year, and the expenses were getting higher."

The rising costs of legal liability and South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control regulations, repairs, pool chemicals and lifeguards, had pushed the admission fee to $5 day in recent years. It wasn't enough to keep pace with expenses.

"We definitely didn't want to shut it down, but when you don't have the money, there's not much you can do," West said.

Another price increase was not a practical option, West said, in part because the increasing number of residential pools had taken a toll on business.

"Back when it was built, everybody didn't have something in the backyard," West said.

The pool was built and financially subsidized for many years by the Pelzer Manufacturing Co. The town of Pelzer has had to cover the losses since the mill closed 15 years ago.

Closing the pool forces Pelzer into another expense: To comply with health department regulations, the town will be fined if it doesn't remove the pool in one year.

"By this time next year, if no one has stepped in to help financially, we'll have to fill it in, because it's considered a safety hazard," West said. "We'll have to get bids in coming weeks to see what that will cost."

Pelzer's story is a familiar one. A public pool, often open less than four months a year, typically costs significantly more than $100,000 a year to operate.

"Our last few years, we were losing between $350,000 and $375,000 on the two pools," said Bobby Beville, city of Anderson recreation director. "Even in our best years, when we didn't have to replace a lot of machinery, we were losing money."

And the losses were mounting.

"Insurance is high. Maintenance is high. We were using older equipment that was costly to repair, and in some cases the manufacturer no longer made a replacement," Beville said. "We were able to keep the Sheppard pool open for a little longer by taking the good parts of the Hudgens pool so that we'd have a backup part."

Beville called the public pool closings "a national problem," one with no practical solution.

"I've always said that if there was money to be made in pools, you'd see private companies building them and selling memberships," Beville said. "I don't think you're going to see that."

In Anderson, the Hudgens Swim Center and the Sheppard Swim Center opened in the mid-1970s. Hudgens closed in 2009 and Sheppard in 2011.

Anderson School District 5 and the city split the pool operating costs with the city. But as the school system withdrew its funding, the city budget was increasingly strained.

The Pelzer pool is at least the 18th to close in South Carolina in recent years.

In the meantime, the number of private in-ground pools in the U.S. soared from 2,500 in 1950 to more than five million in 2010, according to the National Swimming Pool Foundation.

In Oconee County, the Walhalla city pool is operated by the YMCA but is open to the public.

Follow Abe Hardesty on Twitter @abe_hardesty

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