Bangor sets fees for Dakin Pool use

BANGOR – The City Council’s decision Monday night to establish user fees for Dakin Pool proved controversial.

Though the original council order called for fees that were half those of the city’s year-old, larger Beth Pancoe Municipal Aquatic Center, councilors adopted the same fee structure for both pools.

Councilor Richard Greene, who made the motion to that end, said that his reason for doing so was that the lower fees discussed earlier for Dakin Pool wouldn’t generate enough money to cover even the $2,300 cost of the pool attendant hired to collect them.

The fees are meant to help defray operating costs and provide a means for a more accurate head count of Dakin Pool users, numbers that have been dwindling since the larger Pancoe pool opened last summer, according to city documents.

“This is a way, basically, to defray our cost,” Greene said.

Dakin Pool recently escaped closure. After an estimate suggested the bathhouse could cost more than $300,000 to replace, councilors voted to close the pool.

That decision prompted residents of the east side, where the nearly 50-year-old pool is located, to organize the Save Dakin Pool Committee, which now goes by Friends of Dakin Pool.

After some debate, councilors agreed to keep the pool open for another year to give the neighborhood group time to develop a strategy for replacing the pool’s bathhouse.

Greene’s motion took resident Michael Robinson, a spokesman and member of the pool group’s executive committee, by surprise.

“I’ve just begun to fight,” he said after the vote. “It’s just going to make it harder for low-income kids and special needs kids to swim.”

Robinson, who left a recent committee meeting during which the fees were discussed, said he felt “betrayed.”

“We thought the fee schedule had been decided. There was no discussion about higher fees, and I feel that we’re kind of getting back-stabbed,” he said.

Besides Greene, councilors voting to bring Dakin’s fees to the Pancoe pool level were John Cashwell, Peter D’Errico, Susan Hawes, Richard Stone and Dan Tremble. Councilors Annie Allen, Frank Farrington and Geoffrey Gratwick were opposed.

The 6-3 vote to charge the same fees at both pools followed Allen’s failed attempt to forestall the fees by moving for indefinite postponement, which would have in effect killed the order establishing them. The council majority nixed the attempt in a 7-2 vote.

Effective this summer, fees for both pools will be as follows: $1, resident youths age 16 and under; $2, nonresident youths 16 and under; $2, resident adults 17 and older: $4, nonresident adults 17 and older.