Editori's note: This submission has been updated. The letter writer originally questioned why Coun. Clare Cameron would not have volunteered for the St. Davids pool fundraising committee, stating that she lives in that area of NOTL. However, that is incorrect: Cameron does not live in St. Davids, so that reference has been deleted.

Dear editor:

The escalating cost of the proposed new St. Davids pool has been making headlines of late and now a fundraising campaign is planned – but no one volunteered to join that campaign.

Where are all the people from St. Davids who at one time made presentations to council to have a pool built in their part of town?

When I was on council, we did a survey back in the late 1990s about replacing the St. Davids pool, and found many of the users did not live in NOTL, but were from Stamford.

Council as of late has been beating up a lot of the local business people, like St. David’s Cold Storage and developer Rainer Hummel (who responded with a lawsuit), so perhaps it’s not surprising that none of them are stepping forward either.

Can Lord Mayor Betty Disero and council afford to move ahead with the St. Davids pool and put the municipality further in debt by a few million more dollars if those that want the pool aren’t willing to be the primary fundraisers?

For those of us who have been in NOTL longer than most of council we remember when the users of a facility were the ones that raised all of the funds, such as the hockey associations with the two arenas, the arts community for the Pumphouse, etc.

This lord mayor and council are spending like there is no tomorrow.

By emptying reserves, deferring infrastructure, building debt, giving away grants and fighting everything in the courts or the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal, they are financially crippling a town that once had the best infrastructure, the highest reserves and the lowest debt in the entire Niagara Region.

Jamie Slingerland

NOTL