Garden Rapids wins award for innovations

Garden Rapids at The Big Pool is now an award winning pool.

Jennifer Cunningham, Garden City assistant city manager, said the pool was awarded the World Waterpark Association's Leading Edge award at the Garden City Commission meeting Monday.

Cunningham said she didn't realize how big of a deal the award was until she and Aaron Stewart, Garden City Parks and Recreation director, got to the WWA's annual Symposium & Trade Show, which ran from Oct. 19-22 in San Antonio, Texas.

All of the other projects on the slate cost between $30 million and $50 million, one of them was in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which looked like something out of a magazine, Cunningham said. Garden City was the only municipality receiving this award.

"As they started to describe to us that municipalities don't win these types of awards typically, this is the World Waterpark Association and people are really going out bang for your buck, so these Leading Edge awards are people who are doing things that no one else is doing," she said. "To think of little Garden City, here in Kansas, winning this award, I was kind of shocked and in awe at that point."

Stewart said he didn't know what to add other than it was a really cool event and there was great interest in Garden Rapids.

"They don't run education sessions when they run their trade show, so I kind of hung out with a guy from SplashTacular and WTI and as they were playing video of our park, it was definitely the talk of the conference," he said. "It was really cool to watch people's reactions, watch people come off the Fly Time and obviously run the SlipStream down."

Mayor Roy Cessna said Garden Rapid's recognition shows that the city built something unique, which was a goal of the Commission and staff in replacing The Big Pool.

"I think this award rally shows (everyone) knocked it out of the park," he said. " ... Jennifer did an outstanding job getting input from all the patrons in our community and surrounding area and shows that they truly hit the goal of what the Commission wanted and I think this award really proves that."

In other business, Stewart gave an end of season report for Garden Rapids.

Stewart said there were 53,275 swimmers for the season, which surpassed the projected total of 46,010 swimmers by about 7,200. There were 27,600 more than in 2019 at The Big Pool.

"All-in-all, if we're looking at it from my point as a Parks and Rec. director, if we're looking at engagement, we have engaged a lot more people into this park, which is one of my bigger goals," he said.

Gate revenue also exceed projections by $34,000 at $172,120.65 for the season. This is almost $121,000 more than what was generated in 2019.

Average daily attendance was about 740 people per day. Stewart said it was projected there would be an average of of 535 swimmers per day.

"Part of what you have to understand when they put these projections out there, they're actually probably looking five years ahead," he said. "The first year we're obviously going to be above that, but we need to monitor that as we're going forward, looking five years back, that's where we should be or better."

Daily attendance was still an increase of 431 people from 2019, which had an average attendance of 309 per day.

Stewart said they did not sell as many passes - punch passes and annual single, family and add-on passes as they expected.

"I think one of the reasons for this is you'd have to go 16 times before the punch pass actually pays off," he said. "At a $3 entry rate, I don't think people are really probably thinking far enough ahead of how many times that they're going to go. I think that's proven by how many daily admissions we have now."

For a single annual pass a person would have to visit the pool 25 times before the pass pays for itself and 14 visits, assuming $12 per visit for four people, for a family pass to pay itself off.

Events were well attended and exceeded projections, Stewart said, however, projections were really conservative, which makes the results look like they "absolutely killed it."

Night swims were a very popular event, Stewart said. A poll they conducted found that people preferred the straight up night swims verses the movie nights, so if those are combined there were a total of 745 people who attended the night swims, which eclipsed all the other events.

In the next season they will probably look at eliminating some of their events, namely the 12 and Under event, which ran every Tuesday morning, however only 154 attended, Stewart said. Deck Art will probably also be discontinued and may be transitioned into another adult night.

Cabana rentals were down from projected numbers, but they weren't finished until mid-August, so there was a lot less revenue generated, Stewart said.

"We did use the full cabana at the south end of the pool to do a lot of those rentals, we did have, and these are in hours, so 23 hours rented, and then one pool rental, which is the full two-hour rental for $1,500," he said. "That left $87,000 shortage based on the projected."

Concessions revenue was better than projected with a total of $106,469, which was almost $26,000 above the projected revenue of $74,520, but there was an issue keeping things stocked.

Chemical costs were $61,600 less than in 2019 at $25,805.94 for the season, but they were still higher than the projected $20,000, Stewart said. But that can be attributed to 16, 2 inch pipe leaks that they did not know about, so they were losing water.

"It was hard for us to recognize that there was an issue because we were saving so much water compared to what we used to do," he said. "What happened is when we got to the point where we shut down and expected that water to trend down verses the splash out and the higher temps evaporating, that didn't happen and it kept going. That's what triggered us to say something was wrong."

While they did lost some water due to the pipe leaks, they did save 25 million gallons of water compared to 2019, Stewart said. Now that pipe leaks have been fixed, he anticipates even better numbers in 2022.

"Reasonable estimate for next year, we'll save another additional 2.9 million gallons to 3 million gallons, that's my best guess," he said. "The nice thing is we were still quite a bit lower and that looks to improve quite a bit, which will also improve that chemical cost dramatically."

This article originally appeared on Garden City Telegram: Garden Rapids at The Big Pool wins award for innovations