This will be fun, fast and furious – and it matters. You can help it to succeed in its purpose of hammering home to Argyll & Bute Council that this facility is important to all of its community and it needs to be fairly supported.

Gear up

You can also help to make it as much fun as possible. Be inventive with what you wear. It needs to be as visually outlandish as possible and to relate to water sports. The organisers suggest swimming goggles, swimhats and armbands – and you’ll think of more as well. What about flippers and snorkels. If the weather’s bad, a wet suit will  be just the job anyway.

All you surfies who head to Machrihanish and Tiree, bring your boards. Sea swimmers, bring your body boards. You all need to be able to swim, don’t you?

Learn Beach Boy songs (and there’s Rod Stewart’s ‘We are sailing’) between now and the big day – Saturday 19th December.

The March

Meet at the Pool itself at 10.30am for an 11.00am swim through the town, led by the Mid Argyll Pipe Band which has offered its services as a sign of support. There will be a dinghy and a kayak in the parade – reinforcing the fact that these clubs cannot accept non-swimmers as members.

The band will take a break from time to time. When they do, hit those songs you’ve learned. Get some good chants going: ‘Only a fool / would lose a pool’. Whatever take your fancy.  Be creative.

When you get to Front Green, there will be rousing speeches. Be roused.

There has been a rumour circulating locally that Council staff have been instructed not to attend the march. We checked with the Council on whether there is any substance to this and a spokesperson has categorically described it as totally without foundation.

So all of you who work for the Council and who swim and who have children who swim – let’s see you there. Your support will not be seen as anti-Council – because it won’t be. It will be seen as pro-pool – because it will be.

The issue

Mid Argyll’s children need to learn to swim. They live on a lochside. Adults need the exercise. Disabled people need the therapy of exercise with weightlessness. Older people need to maintain flexibility and fitness without impact stress on their joints.

People wishing to engage in a range of sports for which Aryll has unparallelled opportunities – like sailing, kayaking, diving and surfing – cannot do so unless they can swim.

The Mid Argyll Pool is indoors, available year round and supports all these needs. It is unthinkable that the heart of Argyll should be left without so important a resource for health, fitness and recreation in the 21st century.

The background

The new Board of the Pool has already done wonders by pulling the pool back into service after the collapse of the previous regime in March this year, leaving appalling financial and operational disorder.

• The Manager had been off on sick leave for a year – now for over 18 months.
• No maintenance had been done for a very long time.
• The venue did not even have an electronic till to record transactions.
• Subscription prices had not been reviewed for years.

With the staffing situation as it is, the new Board – all volunteers and with day jobs of their own to sustain – has actually been running the Pool’s operations, effectively shouldering the responsibilities of the absent manger – a situation which must be urgently resolved with both sides recognising the imperative of community good. And one of the two sides – the new Board – has had no part in whatever led to this mess.

The role of the Council

Argyll and Bute Council has an apparently idiosyncratic approach to funding swimming pools across the territory. It owns some of them, contracts out the operation of another and supports, in wildly varying degree, the two community-owned pools – one on Islay and the Mid Argyll in Lochgilphead, the latter funded as the Cinderella for no given reason.

Facts and figures can be found in our previous articles – and no one should anticipate that logic will provide the key to understanding them.

For Argyll asked the Council for the common basis of calculation used to determine the funding given to each pool. Given that each is highly individual, it is obvious that the only way the Council can reconcile these differences is to apply a common formula standardising the principles on which they fund them.

We asked to see the formula because we refused to accept the Council’s repeated mantra that there is no way of comparing one pool with another and therefore one funding award with another.  But of course there is.

The response was, as we have reported, that our request would be treated as having been made under Freedom of Information legislation – not something we shrink from but not what we had done on this occasion. However, it does mean that the Council will have a statutory period available to clarify the funding formula applied.

The Council is in a hole and digging madly

If this sounds like we’re against the Council – we’re not.

We have been as quick to celebrate its many recent successes as we have been to go in hard where it has fallen back – as it has in this case. Here it has simply – through defending an indefensibly inequitable situation which has arisen over time from a series of inherited ad hoc funding decisions – dug itself stubbornly into a hole. And it is still digging. This is unintelligent as well as unhelfpful.

It is worth noting that one principled Councillor for Mid Argyll – Dougie Philand – was so alienated by the Council’s lack of openness in decision taking on the matter that he has recently resigned from the Alliance of Independent Councillors. This group, along with the SNP group, makes up the current ruling coalition in the Council.

The Council’s treatment of the current Board

The public mood is against the Council on this matter. Its decisions are beyond interpretation. Its treatment of the current Board, who have been working punishingly hard and with real success, has been dismissive and close to contemptuous.

Instead of recognising the huge amount the new Board has done in little over 6 months, the Council has criticised them for what they have not yet managed to do.

We asked to see the detail of the work undertaken by the members of the new Board and by its co-opted members – and this has been shown to us. We have been asked by the Chair of the Board not to publish any of it as he does want the Board to seem to be blowing its own trumpet.

We respect this and are doing as we have been asked. But it is worth noting that we would not have seen the detail of responsibilities had we not specifically asked for it. In all of its statements the Board has deliberately under-represented the workloads its members have been carrying – but they are significant.

• They have raised money from public subscription to keep the pool going.
• They have set up proper administrative and staffing rota procedures.
• They organise and supervise the pool’s operations.
• They have audited its operations.
• They have visited other pools to research their operations and their trading strategies.
• They are building relationships with other pool Boards.
• They are building relationships with sports groups in the area to explore their potential use of the pool building as a base for other events of their own.
• They have created and prioritised a plan of action.

The Board has made a specific request for an immediate £10,000 to pay off debt that will otherwise cause the pool to close around the turn of the eyear; and it has asked for the Council to raise its annual grant by£30,000pa to bring the pool into line with the £78,000pa support provided to Argyll’s other community-owned pool – the McTaggart on Islay.

But, according to the Council, the Board’s laggardliness is demonstrated by the facts that:

• It has not yet built a three year Business Plan. (How long does that take?)
• It has not yet attracted external funding. (How long does that take?) Ironically, the Board’s explorations on this matter made it clear that bodies who would wish to award funding towards the pool cannot do so because there is no guaranteed continuing revenue support from the Council.
• And it has not yet resolved the problem of global climate change.

The Council has refused the support requested. It has given support in kind – in advice and staffing contributions. It has offered to bring forwards the payment of a future quarter’s grant of £13,000 and keeps insisting that the Board can ‘trade its way out of its difficulties’.

And what does the Board do in three months time when it is already heavily indebted by tranches of grant paid in advance? It cannot be expected to keep the pool going by trickle feed on hock. Even to suggest this calls into question the Council’s own fiscal intelligence.

The Council is not a monster and it is not made up of bad guys. But it is making a real pig’s ear of this situation – and without obvious reason. It does itself no favours by persisting in this behaviour and we would be dishonest if we pretended that the case was otherwise.

Public support

Over 4,000 people have signed hard copy and online petitions to save the Mid Argyll Pool. Local businesses have given work to maintain the pool without charge, as a gesture of support. Shops in the area have given the poster for Saturday’s demonstration prominence in their premises.

Local businesses know that if the Lochgilphead pool closes and people have to go to Oban to swim and to learn to swim, they will take the opportunity to shop there as well.

Posters and flyers have been distributed and dsplayed throughout Mid Argyll – in GP practices, shops and petrol stations. They have also been disseminated by email groups and via facebook – which has a ‘Support the Pool’ group and an event page for the march.

The Police are being constructive and helpful in making the necessary arrangements for the demonstration and March and the Board have greatly appreciated this.

The next step

• Get dressed up and hit the march on Saturday. The pool needs the biggest show of numbers Mid Argyll can muster to ram home the point that this community needs and wants this pool to remain available. It has a loyal staff who are paid little if anything above the minimum wage – itself a real wrong. Yet they believe in the pool and they want to make it work. They and the Board need a first class manager and this situation must be resolved as a matter of urgency.
• The Board also needs people with specific skils to bring their expertise to securing the future of the pool. With enough people as members, willing – individually and in working groups – to take on responsibility for particular aspects of what has to be done, no one need be overworked and everything can be done well.

Can you help?

Do you have and would you contribute the skills, time and commitment needed to ensure the future of the pool? What the Board needs are people to join it who bring knowledge and experience in:

• business acumen
• facilities management
• funding applications
• marketing and promotion
• leading and developing swimming groups
• creating and managing events
• anything else you can offer which you know will help.

It wants to hear from you. The community needs your help in taking the pool into survivability.

If you can help, email Stephen Whiston, Chair of the Board: stephen.whiston@btinternet.com

See you on Saturday.

Related Posts

• Meeting of minds on Mid Argyll Swimming Pool (3)
• Save Our Pool: the day Mid Argyll became a community (17)
• Sleep-starved Mid Argyll Pool Board submits Business Plan to Council (0)
• Council statement on its position on the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool (1)
• Latest on Mid Argyll Swimming Pool (1)

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