STEUBENVILLE — Renovations to the Belleview Park Pool are going to cost more than city council had planned — a lot more.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Fort Steuben Maintenance’s Vince Oliver briefed council on problems they’d uncovered, which include the pool floor, decking, and fence. He said they also learned the new, $75,000 sliding board council chose won’t pass state permitting requirements because of the hand rail and the manufacturer, a Canadian company, refuses to make any adjustments to accommodate more stringent regulations in the U.S.

He told council the fixes, excluding the slide, to the issues they’ve found thus far could cost in the neighborhood of $266,300 — and that doesn’t include any others they might come across.

Oliver said the rubberized finish crews are currently trying to remove from the bottom of the pool and no matter what they try it’s pulling up chunks of concrete.

“(We) discovered very quickly that the concrete of the main pool floor is in very bad condition, a very soft condition,” Oliver said. “We tried anything that we could try…and with every (thing we tried) we were taking hunks of concrete out of the bottom of the pool.”

And back in 1989, when the pool was last updated, he said the contractor poured the new decking directly on top of the old one. “It was shot,” he said, “(and) instead of removing that concrete–replacing the sub base and replacing that concrete properly, the deck that we just removed was placed directly over top of it. In addition to that, all of the lighting and electrical features around the pool were all fed by new electric, new conduit, new conductors (and were) placed on top of the old concrete deck. So not only did you have failure in the former concrete deck, you had moisture and failure in the conduit and conductors.”

He said they also discovered the fence surrounding the pool will have to be replaced.

“Normally, when you put a chain link fence up, you put it into the ground and a chain link on it, and it works,” he said. “When the deck that we’ve removed was placed over the deck that was there, plates were welded to the bottom of the fence posts (and) the posts were stood up on the old concrete and the new concrete was poured around it so you had a stable post. But now that the concrete deck is gone, I can literally pick up every post that’s there and walk away, there’s no structural integrity.”

Oliver said some costs, like pouring new concrete decking, were within the scope of work of Fort Steuben’s contract. Others — like the cost to bust up and remove the pre-1989 decking and the original pool floor that’s crumbling as they try to remove the rubberized finish — are additional.

“The bright spot is that anybody that we have working on this job, any of the subcontractors that we’ve hired to do this work, are all local Steubenville contractors,” Oliver said. “We made it a point (to do that), so maybe that’s a little bit of sun at the end of at the end of a little bit of a storm.”

He said the new slide yet hasn’t been ordered yet and can be pulled from the work order should council choose. He said he’d also found a local fabricator with the expertise to bring the handrail on the slide up to code for another $12,000-$14,000.

Should council decide to nix the slide for now, he suggested it would make sense to proceed with the plumbing connections while the renovation is in progress — eating up more than a third of the $75,000 they stand to save by not doing the slide.

“Deliberate however you want to, but if you would ever want to put it in in the future I would advise you plumb it now,” he said. “That would reduce your (savings) from $75,000 to about $41,000.”

Instead, council voted 6-1, with Councilman Tracy McManamon casting the only no vote, to authorize the additional work. McManamon had requested a one-week delay delay, referencing another “big expense” on the horizon in the next couple weeks and suggesting they wait until the finance director can be there to tell them if it’s financially doable and if so, where the money will come from.

Oliver, however, said the additional work would push the pool’s opening back 30 days and council was concerned that even a one-week delay in giving him the go-ahead would set them even farther back.

Prior to the vote City Manager Jim Mavromatis told council it boils down to whether they want to spend the money.

“This is not going to bankrupt us,” he said. “Yes. It will lower some of our fund balances. But the bottom line is we’re at a point now — and none of you sitting here caused any of this, you inherited it and that’s the problem (with) kicking cans down the road. You have to decide, do you want this poll for our citizens here …t that’s what we’re at.”

Though concerned that they might encounter more problems, Councilman at large Joel Walker said it was important to move the project forward, pointing out “we’re already in it this far.”

“I do think we’re at the point where we know we want the pool to open,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a real big question (about) it. We’re just concerned with what’s going to happen next. You don’t know. We don’t have a crystal ball on that.