KAILUA-KONA — The Kona Community Aquatic Center will reopen to the public on Tuesday.
“We want to say thank you to all the swimmers, all the athletic teams, all the kids that couldn’t swim in the pool all this time, all the seniors, all the people that missed their exercise classes,” Hawaii County Parks and Recreation Director Roxcie Waltjen told West Hawaii Today Thursday morning. “We really appreciate your understanding and your patience in holding hands with us and going through this whole ordeal.”
Maurice Messina, deputy director for the Department of Parks and Recreation, said the pool will be open seven days a week.
There will be two sessions per day Monday through Friday. Session one will run 6:15 a.m. to 1245 p.m. and session to will be 2 to 6:45 p.m., Messina said.
On weekends, the sessions will run 8:15 to 11:35 a.m. and 1 to 4:45 p.m., Messina said.
The pool, which is Hawaii County’s most used aquatic facility, has been closed to the public since the March 1 failure of its sand filtration system that keeps the water clean in both the adult Olympic-size and smaller keiki pools.
Aquatic Solutions Hawaii was awarded the $243,550, 125-day contract to replace the five-filter system and conduct other repairs to the facility in late May. The bid was substantially lower than officials estimated the project would cost at $400,000.
The contractor completed the work earlier this month as scheduled.
Since then, county crews have been cleaning the 25-year-old facility and giving much of it a fresh coat of paint.
Prior to the shutdown, the county said the pool was its most used aquatic facility on the island. Between July 2018 and February, an estimated 118,000 people used the facility, including various swim teams and groups.
The nearest county pool to Kona Community Aquatic Center is located about a dozen miles away at the Konawaena Pool in Kealakekua.
See Friday’s West Hawaii Today for the full story.