“We need county officials to work cohesive with us because our master plan needs to be part of their master plan and vice versa,” City of Blue Ridge Councilman Nathan Fitts said during a regular council meeting Tuesday, March 10.
“We’re all one community, serving the same people, same thing, and right now there’s such a division. Like we need to be doing a workshop together every year, and we all need to be on the same page because there’s no sense in all of us doing the same thing and having to pay for it twice.”
Fitts continued by saying he doesn’t feel that spending an exorbitant amount of money on the pool is worth it when comparing it to revenue, and if spending the money is going to set the city back he “can’t justify using taxpayer’s money for that.”
A quote of around $50,000 was estimated in order to get the pool up to standards.
“We must be up to code or the health department, they wouldn’t approve for us to open every year if we were not within code,” Mayor Donna Whitener said. “We pass our inspections every year.”
Councilwoman Rhonda Haight said that making the improvements to the pool is not a guaranteed fix.
Fitts and Haight presented the idea of working with Fannin County officials to create an indoor pool or mimic something similar to Blairsville’s facility.
“Maybe we’ll do without a pool for a year, but if we can start working on a long term solution for a really nice indoor-year-round-pool,” Haight said. “Hopefully the county will work with us. They have an allotted amount of money from SPLOST that goes to recreation, and that’s what we’re hoping will happen," she continued.
She and Fitts agreed that the community should push the commissioners to make this happen.
Councilwoman Robbie Cornelius proposed a poll be placed in the “newspaper” asking if the city’s pool is used.
“The one thing I hate to see about not having a pool is there are a lot of kids who don’t have the privilege of going to the beach and other vacations, and this is their vacation is to go to the pool.” Whitener said. “There’s some kids where that’s their daycare for the summer.”
Haight said the school system could pitch in and get a swim team.
Whitener said that was discussed before and the council was not interested in moving forward.