My questions about the
aquatic center agreement:1. Why is the document dated 2007? If attorneys have been working on this you would think the date would be accurate.
2. Who picked out the 25 year time frame? The average life of one of these pools before major renovations and repair need to be done is 20 to 25 years.
3. Why is Tech being given 5 free years? Will citizens get the same consideration?
4. Who will be handling concessions at the Aquatic Center? If Tech does, then there will be no tax revenue generated for the town.
5. Who will handle parking at the events? Will the parking lot be exclusive to Tech as well, meaning that citizens will not have access to the skateboard park during competitions? If fees are charged for parking at these events, who gets the money?
6. If Tech has exclusive rights to the two largest dressing rooms, where will their competitors dress and store equipment during competition? Does this mean the citizens will lose the two smaller dressing rooms at meets?
7. Who will have to clean up the building and grounds after these meets? Per #7 of the agreement, it looks like no matter how big the mess, it will be taxpayer money that has to foot the bill for cleaning up after all events.
8. If Tech has exclusive rights to the dressing rooms and the Town hosts meets for high school teams, etc., what dressing rooms will they be given, the citizens?
9. Will the town get a percentage of the ticket sales to these events?
10. Why is there such a focus on saying that the $250,000 per year will be used towards payment of the facility when in actuality, that will cover less than 1/4 of the projected operating cost of the facility? (Is that 1/4 of the cost equal to the current percentage of time Tech will be using the facility? Is there something in there to compensate the town when 10 years from now, the cost of operation has gone up 20, 30, 40%?)
11. Part of the grand plan for paying for the facility, is to host a string of other meets at the facility. That takes pre-planning and advertising. If Tech doesn't have to give a list of dates it will need the center for practices until: "By July 1 of every year, VT will advise the Town of its training schedule for the period September 1 through April 30. By March 1 of every year, VT will advise the Town of its training schedule for May 1 through August 31."
This means that the Town can't plan and advertise/recruit participants for events from Sept. 1 thru April 30 until July 1. and for the May 1 thru August 31 period until March 1. This will leave a very narrow window for the Town to make plans and find participants for such groups. How can that compete with areas where plans for such events are made a year or more ahead of time?
12. Tech will have the exclusive use of the pool for 10 weekends and the town will be notified of those by August 1 of every year. What lead time does that leave the town for organizing it's own activities? The agreement give no idea of any proposed dates for those events so, in theory, they could begin August 15th and be scattered through the year.
13. Where does it cover any damage done to the facility by Tech?
It is unfortunate that the copy of the agreement I received did not include the attachments of exhibits noted in #13. Perhaps whatever those attachments are would have answered some of my questions. Or, perhaps they would have generated more. I do believe those should have been provided along with the agreement itself, since legally those attachments should have been provided to the Town Council as well. Hopefully, those will be available to the public before the Public Meeting....or will be available at the Jan. 6th meeting with plenty of time to be read or the public meeting will be delayed until the Town Council and CITIZENS have a chance to review them. This is exactly the type of behavior that can lead people to believe that something is going on behind the backs of Council and Citizens.
I gotta go back and review the State Codes concerning leasing of public property and franchises (rfp required?). It's a good thing that I love doing research:)