Imagine a morning swim in an indoor pool while watching the sun rise or the snow fall.

That’s what draws at least four regulars to the Old Town community pool three days a week. They have to wake up early, and three of them drive from Veazie, but the windows on the outdoors are worth it at a facility that could close in eight weeks.

Gina Butler of Old Town and Veazie residents Verna St. Peter and Rosemary Leonard chatted and laughed after a recent workout as they walked out of the pool building on the grounds of Old Town High School.

Some days they might have a bite of breakfast at Old Town restaurants Johnny’s or Governor’s with Alexandra Wildey, a fourth member of the group who has taken this morning off.

The group has been swimming together three mornings a week for more than a decade. They’ve been to other local pools, but for them, there’s nothing like Old Town with its sliding glass doors that let in the light.

“The windows to the outside make it a good way to start the day,” said Butler. “We love to see the sunrise.”

“It’s like windows on the world,” Leonard said.

And the women don’t want to see the pool close, which could be its fate in the wake of Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s decision in March to close its mill in Old Town, leaving more than 400 workers jobless and a $1.2 million shortfall in the city budget.

If the city, school department and Old Town-Orono YMCA can’t come up with last-minute funding to keep it open this winter, the 38-year-old pool will be shut down after Aug. 31, leaving the historically strong high school swimming team without a home pool, moving both the YMCA’s club team and the high school swimmers to a less-than-ideal location, and taking away the sunrises from morning lap swimmers.

There is hope for the pool’s future as a group of city, school and YMCA officials, along with interested townspeople, are meeting this summer to pare their budgets. But without tax revenue from the mill, and with local budgets already stretched to the limit, this past winter may have been the pool’s last.

Sacrificing to save jobs

The community pool wasn’t supposed to be open this summer, but the three entities that own or help run the facility – the city, the school and the Old Town-Orono YMCA – got together and found a way to budget for free swim, lap swim and practices for the Y-based Canoe City Swim Club until school opens.

The three-way relationship among the city, school and Y is unique, City Manager Peggy Daigle said.

“We have a pool that is city-owned, attached to the school, and is used for three different entities,” she said. “Everybody was responsible for a different chunk of the operation.”

The pool, which was built at a cost of $240,000, including about $65,000 in federal funds, was dedicated June 25, 1968.

The city of Old Town operated the pool until 1999. Then the city turned over operations of the pool to the YMCA, to which the city pays a contractual amount of money yearly. Last year the YMCA received $83,556 to run the pool.

The average city outlay has been about $115,000 a year for the pool. The school has spent roughly $60,000. The city and school share heating and utility costs, with the school paying the bills during the school year and the city taking care of the summer months.

While working on 2006-07 budget proposals, the city decided to look at what it would cost to run the pool as it did before turning things over to the YMCA. The city detailed every possible expense, from lifeguard salaries to pool chemicals to the cost of a phone line. The final tally was $261,296.

Even without several repair projects that likely will be necessary in the near future, such as repairs to the roof, pool deck and locker rooms, it was a staggering number considering the $1.2 million shortfall.

“As we get down to crunch time with the budget [the pool] seemed the easiest thing to take off the plate, but it also impacts on the sports teams that need it,” Daigle said. “We were trying as hard as we could not to have the impact on people in terms of lost jobs.”

Making YMCA pool fit

Several Old Town student-athletes spoke at City Council meetings about the pool, Daigle said, but there has been no big outcry from residents. That may be because swimmers have another option in town.

In addition to maintaining the community pool, the YMCA also runs a pool at its own facility.

The YMCA pool is 25 yards long, which is a regulation length for meets and should be fine for swimmers to get in their yardage.

But the Y facility is considered a therapeutic pool, which means it’s kept at a higher temperature so people with conditions such as arthritis can benefit from exercising in heated water. Jill Nitardy, the Old Town-Orono Y’s executive director, said the pool now is kept at around 86 degrees.

The YMCA has agreed to lower the temperature to about 83 degrees which, according to Y aquatics director Tristan Springer, is on the low end of what the National Arthritis Foundation considers therapeutic.

Eighty-six degrees is fine to exercise muscles and alleviate pain, but it’s too warm for lap swimmers.

“The Y pool is too hot for what we want to do,” said Verna St. Peter, who swims almost a mile during her morning lap swim. “I couldn’t swim that many laps in a hot pool.”

While the YMCA’s pool will have to be refitted, there are concerns about what changes will take place if the community pool is closed for the winter.

When summer is over the pool will go into what Daigle termed a “warm shutdown.” That entails draining pipes and putting antifreeze into the plumbing to avoid cracks, among other things.

No one really knows what will happen to the pool if it is shut down for an extended time.

“There aren’t too many indoor pools that get wintered over,” Springer said. “If it was to close this fall, you don’t know what the state of the pool will be at the end of the winter, and you never know how bad a Maine winter could be. If something happens in the middle of the winter, are there going to be funds there to fix it?”

That’s a big concern for folks like Daigle, who don’t want to have an even bigger budgetary problem if there is major damage.

“The community has told us, try to make good decisions that put in place temporary solutions, but don’t permanently destroy the facility,” she said. “Don’t lower the temperature so that everything freezes and the ground shifts and there’s a crack.”

Youth affected

A few hours after the lap swimmers clear out from their morning swims, the younger members of the Canoe City Swim Club gather for practice.

Orono resident Tyler Morrison, whose 6-year-old son, Jacob, was in the pool, sat in the bleachers with other parents. Every time Jacob swam across the width of the pool, he searched the stands for his dad, who flashed a thumbs up.

The Morrisons started Jacob swimming in Old Town because he suffers from Legg-Calve-Perthes disease, a rare hip condition in which an interruption in the flow of blood to the hip causes bone death.

Swimming was one of the few exercises he has been cleared to do. And he loves it.

“This has been the best thing in the world,” Tyler Morrison said, his eyes on the water. “We were at the Y for a while [for lessons], but this is the next level. He was able to come here and start this. We’re so glad we did it. It would be a shame if this pool closed.”

Although Canoe City has lost some of its older members because of the uncertain pool situation and a recent coaching change, parents of the younger swimmers appear to want to stay with the club. Springer, a former Old Town High and CCSC swimmer, is coaching the team this summer.

Springer, who also serves as the YMCA aquatics director, estimated that five families of swimmers and five more individuals left CCSC for other club teams such as the Bangor Barracudas, sponsored by the Bangor Y.

Most of the swimmers who left did so because of the coaching change, said Jill Nitardy, the Old Town-Orono YMCA executive director. Matt Vogel, a 1976 Olympic goal medalist who took over the Canoe City program in 2000, left earlier this year for another team in his native Indiana.

But many of the families left Canoe City after it appeared the pool would be closed for the summer.

The loss of revenue from CCSC swimmers, who pay to join the team, shouldn’t affect the Y too much.

“It’s not a cash-cow program for a Y,” said Nitardy, whose husband, Skip Nitardy, coaches the Bangor team. “The expenses that go along with running a swim team and the income that it produces, it’s pretty much a wash.”

The YMCA doesn’t contribute a lot of money toward running the pool, Jill Nitardy said, but offers up its staff, programs and knowledge.

Springer trains, supervises and schedules all of the lifeguards at both pools. She also trains the Y staff and others in the community in lifesaving and first aid. And she works with the Canoe City team.

“She is a resource, and that’s one thing that if the Y wasn’t doing, someone would have to be hired to do that,” Nitardy said. “So although we can’t bring to the table a lot of money, we can bring to the table a lot of knowledge and staff help.”

The Rutherford family also plans to stay with Canoe City. Julie Rutherford, who grew up in Old Town and recalls her summers splashing in the community pool, has a daughter, 7-year-old Alexis, who swims for Canoe City.

“We plan on staying. We definitely like the program, we like the pool, and we like the atmosphere,” Julie Rutherford said as her 4-year-old son, Colin, asked if he could say hello to Springer across the pool. “We like Tristan very much, as you can see.”

High school teams hit

Budget cuts also hit hard at the school department’s athletic programs. Some middle school sports teams were cut, as were some coaching positions.

There will, however, be a high school swimming and diving team next year – despite some rumors to the contrary.

“Swimming is in the budget,” principal Joe Gallant said. “Definitely.”

But closing the pool may be a blow to the pride of a team that has been among the most successful in any sport across the state. Old Town’s boys and girls teams have won a combined 22 state championships, including the first Class A boys title, and the boys claimed 14 Class B titles in a row from 1985 to 1998. The most recent boys title came in 2003. The girls won six straight from 1992 to 1997.

“It’s been a big disappointment,” said Megan Laverdiere, who will be a senior and a co-captain of next year’s girls team but said she was initially under the impression that the team wasn’t going to exist in the 2006-07 season. “It was a really nice pool. It was one of the good ones. [The team is losing] all of the times and memories that we had in the locker room.”

Old Town is one of a few schools in the state to have an on-site pool. Belfast and Cape Elizabeth high schools also have pools.

That meant swimmers could just walk down a hallway to get to practice. If the pool is shut down for the winter, the swim team members will have to get themselves to either the YMCA or the University of Maine’s Wallace Pool.

Gallant said athletic director Greg Thibodeau is in discussions with the university and Orono High School athletic director Mike Archer to find out whether the two high schools can practice together.

“There may be some shared pool time for practices,” Gallant said. “We’re also exploring the possibility of sharing it for meets since we’re in the same class, again to try to save money for both high schools. But not all the details have been worked out.”

It’s unlikely either the high school team or the Canoe City team could hold meets at the YMCA’s pool. That pool has six lanes, which is wide enough for a meet, but one lane is taken up by a ramp. Both teams could find themselves at Wallace Pool for meets, especially when bigger teams come to town.

The squad will be down to one head coach and one assistant coach for both the boys and girls teams, after decades of separate head and assistant coaches for both.

Even for former swimmers like Springer, who competed for both the high school and Canoe City teams and whose father, Doug Springer, coached both high school teams at different points and served as the YMCA’s executive director, it’s an emotional situation.

“I swam here all the way until I graduated,” Tristan Springer said. “Then I came back as the aquatics director to take on these programs and make a better lessons program, build up the swim team, and as an assistant coach for the girls program. That position has already been eliminated. So, what does that say for the swim team if the pool’s closed?”

Keeping the sunrises

Ralph Leonard had practical issues on his mind when, as a former city councilor and prominent businessman, he led the fundraising drive for the pool in the mid-1960s. Several townspeople had drowned around that time, and the local Jaycees, of which Leonard was a member, thought it made sense for a town on an island in the Penobscot River to have a community pool.

Almost 40 years later, Leonard is involved in trying to save what he started.

Leonard, along with Daigle, Nitardy, Superintendent of Schools David Walker, and other representatives of the city, school, YMCA and members of the community, have formed a loose committee that is looking at some last-minute measures to find the money to keep the pool open past Aug. 31.

At the most recent committee meeting June 30, Leonard asked each of the groups – the city, the school department and the YMCA – to come up with a bare-bones, minimum budget of what it would take to keep the pool up and running through the winter.

“My hope would be that we could somehow get by this year,” Leonard said. “If we can get by with a minimum program and minimum maintenance program, that would give us time to then do an in-depth study to see how we might proceed in the future.”

That future likely would have to mean something would be done with the mill. Although a buyer likely would negotiate a lower tax rate – the Georgia-Pacific Corp. mill at one time represented 50 percent of the tax base but when it closed was down to 34 percent, Daigle said, which means another company would be even lower – some tax revenue is better than nothing at all.

But the uncertain status of the mill has Leonard optimistic that if the city, school and YMCA can hold on for one more winter, things could change for the better.

“We’ll know for sure in a few months,” he said. “We don’t know it for sure now. You don’t want to lose the best things you have in town, and, frankly, Old Town has a lot of things going for it.”

Fundraising might help, although like the city and school, many budgets around town are tapped out. There’s also the possibility of pursuing state or federal funds, Leonard said, because of the health and wellness benefits of the pool.

The pool was built to be both an indoor and outdoor facility, which is why Leonard successfully pursued federal funds from the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation in the 1960s. The pool was designed so that during the summer months large panels are removed from the building housing the pool, leaving just the roof shell. At the time, a bureau official said the pool was the first project of its kind in the eastern United States.

The removable side panels are gone now, but large sliding glass doors provide enough light and scenery for Gina Butler, Verna St. Peter, and Rosemary Leonard, whose mornings at the community pool are as much about camaraderie as they are about getting some exercise.

“Right now I’m just betting on this pool,” Butler said before she started off on foot for her home and St. Peter and Leonard got into a car for their drive back to Veazie. “I don’t want to go anyplace else.”