A big thank you to all of the community supporters and responses from the Asheville City Council candidates. The Southside Community Advisory Board invested time, energy, and sponsored other ads to show the petition to more potential supporters. As a result, we have 825 signatures and looking for more. We hope the focus will save the pool/park from further deterioration or being torn down due to blight. This space "have always been not only a place where families gather and children play, it is also a place where people are fulfilled, share stories, become renewed and whole again. Losing this space would mean losing a critical element of who the Asheville African-American community is. When a community has already lost so much - many homes and businesses - a sense of connection - this space (Walton Street Pool/Park) is even more critical." This is why the petition was started. Nothing more and nothing less! The Asheville Blade - Cutting to the Point -asked the Asheville City Council Candidates for comments on Walton Street Pool-Park 1. The Southside Advisory Board has petitioned for the renovation of the Walton Street pool. This is an effort you’ve publicly endorsed. If elected, what is pushing for this going to look like? "It’s getting it in the capital improvement budget, ideally within the first four years and pushing for that to be the number one parks budget increase." Lindsey Simmerly 2. The Southside Advisory Board has started a petition about the renovation of the Walton Street Pool. What’s your position on the need for that and the prioritization, if you’re elected? "I’m glad to see it get some attention. I follow city budgets — and especially city capital improvements, the big infrastructure projects the city embarks on — and I haven’t seen the Walton Street pool on a city capital improvements budget since 2009. The last discussion I heard about it from City Council was back in 2010. At the time, the direction of Council seemed to be that they were going to close the pool and build some sort of Splashville-type fountain down Livingston Street at the Grant Center as a replacement. Obviously this has gone under the radar for a long time and it’s been a real disservice to the residents of Southside and it’s part of the legacy of that neighborhood getting the short end of the stick from the city. So I’m glad to see it coming up. I don’t like to see it presented as this either-or option to some other things, like the park proposed apart from the St. Lawrence Basilica. That’s now how capital works lists happen. There’s always tons of parks projects going on. I hope the efforts of Southside move that back on to the list of things that need to be approved and that it gets some attention as a result." Rich Lee 3. "The Southside Advisory Board has brought a petition to prioritize the renovation of the Walton Street pool. What’s your position on that? Our current five-year capital plan has a lot more money in it — I think it’s $2 million, it may be more than that — over next five years to invest in swimming pools. The Walton Street pool is one we’ve talked about for a long time as one of the ones in most serious need of repair. So I’m all for that. I would want to do that in the context of balancing it within our five year plan. I know some of that money was also intended for other pools so I’d really have to look at that. Walton Street pool stands out in my experience as the swimming pool most in need of attention." Marc Hunt 4. The Southside Advisory Board has put out a petition calling for the repair and renovation of the Walton Street pool and for the city to prioritize this. If elected, what’s going to be your approach? "This Walton Street pool issue sort of came out of left field for me. I kept hearing a few candidates throwing it out there. When I inquired about it I was told that it was not even on the city’s radar at this point, that they did not have the funding to deal with this issue and had not prioritized it to deal with it. I sort of feel like when a new Council gets on this is not really going to happen anyhow, that the city will determine that they don’t have the funds to do this, but I don’t know. I would be open to this if we did have the funding and if that’s what that community felt like was the biggest need for them. If spending that much money to repair the Walton Street pool and the community felt like that could be spent better elsewhere I would be inclined to go that way." Brian Haynes 5. The Southside Advisory Board has petitioned for the city to prioritize the renovation and upkeep of the Walton Street Pool. What’s your position on that? "That pool has a lot of historic value to that community. At times residents in that community may feel that building, that property, that pool have a lot of historic value to them. They’ve watched it, they’ve played in it. Other generations with that kind of legacy have been torn down, removed somewhere else. The value of Walton Street pool and what it means to the residents that live there has to be taken into consideration. How do we build that? We can not, maybe, answer the question of how it got that way and was allowed to fall into disrepair. We may not ever know that and why it was allowed to get into the condition that it is. But what are the steps to improvement? What are the steps to building or rebuilding it? This generation, in the time in which we live, can act so those who come after us will say we made a good decision because we left something that had some historic value and allowed people to help shape it." Spencer Hardaway 6. The Southside Advisory Board has launched a petition and asked the city to renovate and upkeep the Walton Street Pool. If elected, what’s going to be your position on that? "I’d like to see our Parks and Rec programs improved all around, the Walton Street pool included. In a perfect utopia, I would envision our parks and rec aquatics program looking like Greenville County in South Carolina. That would be awesome, I’d love to see that. I’d be interested to know what kind of revenue Greenville County brings in based on their water parks. There’s a lot of people I know who travel down there during the summertime and utilize those areas. My family, we have a family reunion down there every year as a homebase because my family’s from South Carolina. I’d just be interested to see what those numbers are, what type of investment it took go get it up to that level and if it’s paying off. If it is, can we replicate that here with the county, even if it’s one little water park? But the improvement of our system is needed for the quality of life of the people in that area. I support it, I signed the petition. My campaign actually paid for, unbeknownst to anyone who started the petition, the circulation of the petition on social media. When I first saw that from Priscilla [Ndiaye, chair of the Southside Advisory Board] I think they had something like a little less than 100 signatures. So we paid to have it advertised on Facebook and I think, within 24 hours, they were up to 500 signatures. We haven’t paid for it since, but that’s the level of commitment that I have in my community. Someone brought it up as an issue on their platform, I think it needs to be looked at as a broader issue: how can we improve the quality of life? Yes, save the Walton Street Pool. But if you’re looking at save the Walton Street pool for the poor black people, you’ve got to look at all the other issues too. So, in my opinion, I don’t want people to be tricked by that issue. I think it’s been brought up as a ‘save the poor black people’s pool.’ It does need to be improved, that’s true, but let’s look at all the other issues going on in our community: gentrification, income inequality, the possibility of the face of public housing being changed for generations to come. When you look at wanting to improve life in the African-American community, look at all those issues and not just the pool. I can say I support the pool. Who’s not going to say they support issues in a community they don’t have footing in, they don’t have skin in the game in. I keep using these cliché terms because they’re true. But I want that to be conveyed too, so it’s not just ‘what’s an issue we can get votes from the black community on?’ That’s how it’s been reiterated to me and that’s how I see it. [In Greenville] they’ve got these water parks and in every park they’ve got one at the foot of the mountain and people here travel down there all the time. So I wonder what kind of investment that took and is it paying for itself and bringing money in. Is that something we could replicate on a small scale here. Yeah, save Walton Street, but why not save it and make it better than the parks around it? But again, we’re faced with so many money issues it’s kind of like you’ve got utopia on one hand and revelations in the other. Where do you find the fine balance between those two?" Keith Young 7. The Southside Advisory Board has called on the city to prioritize the renovation and upkeep of the Walton Street pool complex. What are your thoughts on that and if elected, how would you proceed? "Obviously this is a big priority for Lindsey Simerly and I think it’s worth looking at. I honestly didn’t know anything about the Walton Street pool before Lindsey got into the race and started talking about it. I need to understand more about all of our pools in general. I understand from the article in the paper that all of our pools are facing maintenance issues, ADA compliance issues. It sounds like there’s just a big suite of work that needs to happen to improve these pools and I don’t know where that stacks up in the context of other parks improvements that need to be done. Particularly with the Walton Street pool is: why don’t more people use it? It’s a smaller pool, so that may be it. But are people in that neighborhood swimming somewhere else and even if we made improvements to that pool would people not come back to the pool? Are they not using the pool because it costs too much to get in? I don’t know if the city has dug into that." Julie Mayfield