Weighing opening

Memorial Day weekend came and went without Portland Water Park opening.

Despite temperatures warming up the facility will stay closed until Portland Park Board says so. It chose last month to keep the pool closed until at least June because of potential risk of accelerating the spread of COVID-19 if it were to open.

Whether or not the pool will open in June, or at all this year, is set to be decided at Tuesday’s park board meeting. The board will also discuss other park facilities — playgrounds, sports venues and restrooms — which also remain closed.

Other municipalities in the area are in the midst of weighing whether to open their pools at all, while Dunkirk and Bluffton’s city governments have already decided that their city’s pools will stay closed this year.

According to Winchester mayor Bob McCoy, his city’s pool is set to open today at 50% capacity. Fort Recovery’s pool will open next week with no official capacity limit, village administrator Randy Diller said.

Ohio’s reopening guidelines for pools is based on a capacity limit by square foot and allows for Fort Recovery’s pool to have a maximum of 250 attendees. Most days the pool doesn’t have more than 100 attendees, so capacity won’t be much of a problem, Diller said.

Lifeguards will be required to wear a mask when they aren’t in a lifeguarding chair, he added. Masks for attendees are not required.

Portland Mayor John Boggs said Thursday that he’s undecided on whether he thinks the pool should open this year. Ultimately it’s a decision for the city’s park board, which voted May 5 to keep all park facilities and the pool closed until at least its June 2 meeting.

Whether or not the water park is open to the public, street and parks department superintendent Tom Leonhard said his staff will get it ready because it’s bad for the pool’s pumps to sit without being used for potentially two years if the pool is closed this summer.

Boggs said Leonhard and Jay County Health Department environmentalist and administrator Heath Butz have discussed how to keep the pool clean if it were to open this summer.

Berne Mayor Gregg Sprunger said Berne City Council is set to decide whether its pool will open at a meeting Monday. He would rather the pool stay closed but ultimately it’s up to the city council, he said.

Bluffton parks superintendent Brandy Fiechter said the biggest contributing factor to the city deciding to keep its pool closed this summer was that the potential risks outweighed the rewards.

“It’s not a money-making thing, it’s more of a service to the community,” Fiechter said about the pool, which costs Bluffton around $40,000 a year to operate.

If the pool were to open and then have to be closed later this summer because the spread of COVID-19 increased, it would cost a lot just to keep open for a few weeks, Fiechter said.

McCoy said Winchester’s pool operations will be modeled after the state’s recommendations published earlier this month. Temperature checks will be taken at the door and names of pool visitors will be recorded so they can be contacted if they were at the pool on the same day as someone who later tested positive for COVID-19, he added.

Dunkirk Park Board voted to keep its pool closed at a meeting in early May.