KINGMAN – The Grandview Avenue municipal swimming pool in downtown Kingman is overdue for an overhaul and the City is working with a consultant to achieve an upgrade before the swim season begins next Memorial Day, May 26, 2025.
Parks and Recreation Director Mike Meersman said a routine inspection last spring detected a host of issues, including the degradation of the one-foot concrete wall between the pool and the equipment room.
“Mainly it’s because of moisture in the room. The pumps are running all the time, the chlorine, and everything has deteriorated the concrete,” Meersman said. “The pool was built in 1941, so there’s going to be some issues with a pool that old. We’re basically going to tear it apart and do it all over correctly.”
The City Council last month authorized a $69,000 agreement with Trident Aquatics International to design the makeover of the 193,000-gallon pool and work to secure a contractor. That process advances next Tuesday when Trident landscape architect Ken Paulson comes to Kingman to begin determining next steps going forward.
“Right now the goal is to have the design completed close to Christmas,” Paulson said. “During that process, there’ll be some sort of preliminary package that could go out to the contractors so we can try to pre-qualify some folks.”
Paulson said it’s necessary to alert and engage the contracting community in advance of calling for bids because the aim here is to complete in eight months a project that would ideally run a year or more. He said Phoenix pool contractors are very busy and it might be that a Las Vegas firm could end up in the mix given closer proximity to Kingman.
“I got my hands full for the next three months – October, November, December – and this week we’re going to narrow down exactly what we’re going to try to pull off,” Paulson said.
Meersman and Paulson envision a January construction start. And the pool’s history may be revealed in the makeover process.
“The pool has probably a concrete subbase of some kind, probably a plaster interior coating most likely some sort of fiberglass, from talking to Mike, that they’ve come in and done some sort of fiberglass technique to it, and then some sort of PVC liner is the last shingle on the pool,” Paulson said. “We’re going to unpeel it and we’re going to see structurally where it sits and try to determine whether we can just peel the existing cover off it, waterproof it and install new equipment and plumbing.”
It’s really the equipment component that requires the upgrade, but Paulson explained the pool is not up to current code requirements, and to upgrade the equipment the facility must be brought up to current code.
Final design and contract award will require future Council approvals. The City has set aside $550,000 for the project.
Dave Hawkins
