Some things are true … until they’re not

I don’t often write in this space about things that have already been in the paper. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, it would often mean writing about “old news.”

The second reason is more difficult. It is the same reason why my boss and the editor of the Review has decreed that we don’t take an editorial stand on this page, especially when it comes to city issues. It takes extraordinary care to separate out the news from opinion when one is taking both approaches to the news. And, when we are talking about a newspaper with a tiny staff of two editorial people and one sales guy, it is very difficult to maintain an air of objectivity in news stories when we are taking a stand in an editorial. In a larger paper, the common approach is to have the news areas and the editorial page staffed by totally different people. The Review does not have that luxury.

But, last week there was something in the paper that I am drawn to comment on anyway. Sue me.

Rod Woodbury, former mayor and monthly Review columnist, is a really good writer. And that is not something one can count on when it comes to freelance contributors to any publication.

I spent a lot of years editing B2B business publications and made a decision early on that it was more important to recruit people deeply involved in the industry we were covering for their expertise as opposed to recruiting people who could really write. As a result, I spent a good chunk of my time each month not just editing but rewriting freelancer submissions. There were a few of our industry experts who could really write well. They were pretty rare and incredibly appreciated.

Woodbury may be a lawyer by trade, but he is a really good writer who always tries to approach whatever he writes about creatively. I really enjoy reading every single one of his columns, even when I totally disagree with his premise or conclusions.

And while some will probably remember most about his column from last week all of the Halloween imagery he used, I was struck by the meat of the argument. By sticking scrupulously to the city’s admirable fiscal conservatism and refusing to go to the voters for permission to take on debt, elected leadership over a decade and a half guaranteed that the new pool everyone seems to want so badly was gonna cost way more than it needed to.

I didn’t get to my job covering Boulder City until January 2023, so I took the city’s word on the cost estimates to replace the pool starting at $27 million in 2021. I was as surprised as anyone to read in Woodbury’s latest column that a design had been submitted even earlier, in 2018. (And Woodbury was mayor in 2018, so he oughta know.)

As opposed to the current design, which includes covered competition and recreation pools. (Or what we call the “family” pool at the Las Vegas aquatic center — Aquatic Springs, represent — where I still teach water aerobics and lifeguard a couple of mornings a week. Basically a shallower pool largely dedicated to lessons and classes like the one I teach.)

Woodbury wrote that the earlier design included a fitness center, food and beverage court, meeting and multi-purpose rooms, new racquetball courts and an outdoor water park with slides.

That is a far cry from the current stripped back proposal and, according to Woodbury, the price tag was less than the $27 million for the 2021 design. And, keep in mind that the cost of that stripped-back design has ballooned first to $37 million in 2023 and, as of last year was estimated to be in the range of $42 million to $44 million.

Let’s do the math, shall we?

We start with 27 divided by 44 which gives us .613. So, $27 million is 61.3% of $44 million. So does that mean that the cost has gone up by 38.7%? Actually it is worse than that. Because the right way to figure that is the difference between 27 and 44 is 17. So, in order to figure what percentage of 27 is represented by 17, we divide 17 by 27 we get .629. So that means that the cost difference between $27 million and $44 million is actually just a hair shy of 63%.

So, if my math is right (and, please, any BC math teachers who want to check it and tell me if I’m wrong, please do so), then the projected cost has increased by nearly two-thirds. Actually probably more because Woodbury says the old design came in at less than $27 million but doesn’t say how much less.

Now, to be fair, no one could have predicted for sure the crazy inflation of the past five years. Between 1990 and 2020, according to inflationdata.com, inflation averaged just over 2%. But these things are cyclical and we were overdue for an economic shock. Inflation averaged nearly 10% in the World War I era, almost 5% in the World War II era and more than 7.5% in the 1970s and 1980s.

The cumulative inflation rate between 2021 and today is 19.2% And some things, including construction materials have gone up way more than that.

And this is where we get to the thought behind the headline up above. Things can be true for a long period or under a certain set of circumstances until things change and suddenly they are no longer true.

In this case, we are talking about that vaunted BC fiscal conservatism. I am a pretty fiscally conservative guy, so the basic idea appeals to me. But in this case, it ended up costing a lot more for a lot less.

Look at it like this: If city leaders had opted to in, say, 2019 they could have gotten the money to build a new pool at an interest rate of less than 4%. (According to the National League of Cities, the average interstate rate on municipal construction bonds in 2019 was 3.66%.)

So to wrap all of these numbers up, if city leaders had proposed and residents approved a $27 million construction bond with a 10-year maturity in 2019, the total cost would have been about $38 million. Which means that using all of the same funding sources as now, that last ballot measure to approve up to an additional $9 million from capital improvement funds would have been unnecessary.

Being fiscally conservative at all costs can sometimes cost a whole lot. In this case for a whole lot less.