Mayor revisits town pool partnership, or: How to spend $600k of your town’s tax money without really trying. Or asking them for input.

Your town officials voted last night to partner up with the YMCA and pay $600,000 over ten years to help build a pool at the new fit4life gym on Hope Mills Road. All three partner groups (so far) are looking to further partner up with the Cumberland County Schools and the county to provide more funding for the pool program.

Click here for link to the town meeting video

So far, those who stand to benefit are gym members and Y members. Anyone can see this is a boondoggle for your mayor and some of her cohort. And the gym. It serves little to no purpose for the rest of the taxpayers footing the bill. There are already four aquatic centers run by Fayetteville Parks & Rec, and several splash pads in the county. Those funds were voted on by the citizens in a 2016 bond referendum. Your town’s partnership with the YMCA was brought up by the mayor pro tem on behalf of the mayor, and voted on by three commissioners who are, similarly, wildly supportive of the mayor in all of her endeavors. No citizen input necessary.

If you are a private citizen and would like to spend $60k a year to help the gym get some memberships, feel free. But it shouldn’t be the place of the town to do partnerships that might help provide a place for a small number of citizens to benefit from.

Why not just pick 100 people and get them season passes to Emerald Pointe Wet n’ Wild? Some of them can take the same bus that your mayor had some of the commissioners take to admire the prototype for this Y “partnership” on an afternoon a couple months back, so she could pimp her “full time mayor” campaign slogan one more time. And heck, they would drive right past it. May as well stop and check it out too. But we are stuck in “partnership” mode because your mayor doesn’t have an original thought in her noggin, and chases every shiny thing that will help her and her cohort look like “leaders.”

Real leaders say no to bad ideas. They don’t chase them to impress voters. When they care about voters, they let the voters decide. They don’t do things through 3-2 majorities on the town board. Hopefully your county public officials will say “no” to funding this. But the majority of your town officials lack that capacity.