Batavia beach to get 'emergency' repairs

The Batavia Park District will make $86,000 worth of emergency repairs to Harold Hall Quarry Beach, so it can open again next year.

But Mike Clark, the district's director, warned the park board Tuesday that the repairs are "just the warning lights on the dashboard of an aging facility that is at a crossroads."

The problems were discovered when maintenance workers were winterizing the facility.

It discovered excessive groundwater infiltration to a sump pump pit in the pump house; a rotting access ladder into the pit; fractures and split fittings in the discharge lines for several of the "mushrooms" and a concrete island in the pool; and spongy, sagging decking at the Island and on the dive tower and its ramp.

The board agreed to get the walls of the sump pump pit in the pump house patched and re-grouted, and to replace the ladder, at an estimated cost of $6,500.

It also agreed to replace the decking, for $15,000.

The water line work is expected to cost about $15,000.

And a sewage lift station ejector pump that has been nursed along several years past its scheduled replacement will be replaced, at a cost of $50,000, and a backup pump added. The station pumps sewage up to sewer lines on Water Street. This summer the pump failed several times, causing sewage to back up into the concession stand, the manager's office and the bathhouses.

The sump pit work will be done this year.

Other work may wait until spring.

The unbudgeted repairs will be paid for with money from the district's capital improvement bond sale.

In November 2008, voters rejected a $36 million plan to revamp Quarry Beach and add a recreation center, including an indoor pool, to the site. Batavia has had swimming in the former limestone quarry, in various forms, since the 1920s. The last major rehabilitation was in the mid-1990s, and the board last year estimated the facility needed $1 million worth of repairs. The district says the pool leaks 250,000 gallons of water a day, during swim season, through cracks in its limestone bottom. It would have been replaced with a concrete bottom.

Attendance dropped from a high of 92,201 in 1995 to 22,554 in 2008.

Proponents of keeping Quarry Beach the way it is suggested that some rule changes over the years discouraged patrons, and questioned if the district had allowed the facility to fall in to disrepair deliberately in order to make the referendum proposal more palatable to voters.

The fixes approved Tuesday night are "just emergency things," Clark said.

"It is a $100,000 commitment more or less that is not going to something else," he said.