Meeting Minutes 01.09.07

In spite of bad weather, the Jan 9th meeting was attended by 15 people at the Moonray Espresso and was a productive start at discussing needs and organizing focus.

Maura Van Ness and Rose Hollis gave a quick overview for newcomers, reviewing the Vision that is evolving for building an Aquatic Center for Snoqualmie Valley residents.

The Agenda for the meeting included discussion of several components of putting together a comprehensive proposal: Marketing Research, Facility Design, Cost Analysis of Construction, and Cost Analysis of Operations. Before long the group agreed that the most important thing to do in the next few weeks and months was to define “who we are”, and to develop a strategy for doing Market Research.

It was decided that for the short term, we would simply identify ourselves as the Sno Valley Aquatic Center Interest Group- with no board titles or committee chairs. An email address and website should be set up as soon as possible. These first steps would set the stage for proceeding with a market research project. Some felt a telephone survey would be the best next step. If that effort provides an indication of strong community interest, we could advance to a written survey, to be distributed in several ways, including newspaper insert, a website link, and good old fashioned face to face contact – handing out forms outside of Ixtapa or the Safeway and QFC.

A particular issue that continues to creep into the conversation has to do with the former Eastman-Rush Foundation - an organization that attempted during the 90’s to accomplish much the same thing as this group, but without success. Many valley residents contributed money to that effort and there are questions about how those funds were spent and what was done with the remaining funds when the project was abandoned. Though some people were able to respond, there are conflicting versions of answers to those questions. The group felt that the Eastman-Rush Foundation issue could become an obstacle to renewing the project unless we could provide a concise and accurate response. Maura Van Ness made a commitment to do more research to find answers to these questions before the next meeting.

The group the spent some time suggesting survey questions to interact with the community by phone and or media. Rose Hollis agreed to compile a Draft version and distribute it to everyone for comments and suggestions.
Maura and Carroll Whipple made arrangements to do facilities research a in the next few weeks and interview pool directors.

The date was set for the next meeting – Feb. 8th – location to be determined and announced at a later date.