If you utilize MoCo’s indoor pools you know it’s hard to get a lane during the regular school months because our public schools promote swim clubs and teams despite the schools having playing fields, but no pools. They get priority at tax-payer built municipal pools. Public school swim programs are allowed to reserve lanes, but not individual swimmers. During the pandemic a reservation system was begun but was not continued and some swimmers said it was unreliable.
Our solidly-taxed county should be able to offer swimmers the same reservation system as employed by MoCo’s golf courses. The reality of our world is that resources are finite, and we ought to judge the deservedness for reelection of our public servants by their ability to provide programs without waiting lists or turning away patrons.
The shortage of public pools has possibly played a role in the private pool rental market that Will Jawando last year proposed to tax, oops I mean charge a fee for licensing and permitting. He seeks to control what he calls the “sharing economy”, possibly meaning he would like to minutely tell us what and how we are to share.
Irony of ironies, Marc Elrich asked that those bills be postponed because the license fee collectors of our county are severely overworked already. We have a lot of fees and next time you walk past the window of a store rebuild site take a look at the price tags of those fees on the permits taped inside the windows. Permit fee collecting working conditions may be so harsh that they will need a union to stand up for their protection. But that would give us just another public service union to further replace the voter voice with contracts longer than election intervals. Democracy has been more an ideal than an actual practice in Montgomery County where we have 11 Council Members only 7 of whom represent specific constituent districts while the remaining 4 are “at large” meaning un-accountable (un-concerned?) to particular neighborhood issues. Our population is estimated to be 1,052,521 so that is 95,683 constituents per council member and over 150,000 people per actual vote representing a district.
Swimming is possibly better exercise than golf so until MoCo has as many indoor pools as it has taxpayer owned golf courses, which is nine, let us hurry up and get the same efficient tee time reservation system set up for our pools so that the ordinary swimmer no longer has to wait and wait for a lane or give up leaving unserved and stressed. Every person’s time is finite and precious.
