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Final 'steps' in place for municipal pool

Posted February 13, 2017 10:00 pm

Renee Trappe

One of the last pieces to finishing the Du Quoin municipal pool renovation has been approved by the state of Illinois.

The steps that will be installed in the pool for disabled residents have finally gotten the OK needed to proceed, said park board President Joe Stephens. They’ll have to wait until warmer weather to do the work — maybe March — but once that is completed and some repairs made in the pool house, the pool will be ready for its May debut.

“The gears turn slowly (in state government) but they finally turned in our favor,” Stephens said, indicating they have been waiting for state approval for a while.

The park board will have its first meeting of 2017 at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 1. The board usually meets from March to October.

Another big project in the wings is sealing up the cracks and putting a new finish on the city’s two tennis courts in Keyes Park.

Stephens said no date has been set for the work, but he anticipates it won’t shut down the courts for longer than a week.

This summer’s work will be the first of five years of repairs, he said.

“The first year will be the biggest work, and every year after that we’ll work on it some more,” he said. “At the end of five years we’ll have good courts for quite a while.

The alternative to the five-year project was to tear up and completely resurface the courts, but that was going to be “very, very expensive,” Stephens added.

The company coming in to do the tennis courts does nothing but repair tennis courts, and Stephens hopes that their expertise means the courts will be in better shape, longer.

And once the pool and tennis courts are done, the park board is looking forward to having more flexibility financially, and to get to a series of small repairs and additions that residents will enjoy, he added. One idea is to install a swing that people confined to wheelchairs can use.

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