1. Survey

ENTERPRISE — Saying that an indoor aquatic center could be a boon for area residents, Wallowa County health officials have launched an effort to gauge the feasibility of such a facility — including how much it would cost to build and maintain.

Larry Davy, the CEO of Wallowa Memorial Hospital, and Chantay Jett, executive director of the Wallowa Valley Center for Wellness, are working to find out what the community would like to see in an aquatics facility — and to gauge the public’s willingness to pay for it.

Davy said results from a 2022 community health needs assessment suggest that many residents in Wallowa County are concerned about the lack of fitness facilities, especially a pool. Wallowa County has not had a public pool since 2001. (See the related story on page A9.)

The assessment results intrigued Davy and Jett.

They hired Ballard*King & Associates, a recreation-consulting firm based in Colorado, to complete a feasibility study for an aquatic center. Part of the effort includes a community survey, which is now online. Mailed copies of the survey should be arriving in residents’ mailboxes soon, said Autumn Wilburn, special projects director for the Center for Wellness. She said the timeline is open for three weeks of public feedback. The survey is completely confidential and grant funding covered its cost, she said.

Jett was born and raised in Joseph and then moved to Seattle for 20 years. She moved her family back to Wallowa County in 2010, and worked on the Integrated Care Center building in Enterprise, which opened in October. The idea for an aquatics center was in the back of her mind during the development of that project.

“When we were looking at the design of the Hearts for Health Integrated Care Center building and how to place it on the property, we asked the architect to place it in the corner of the property so that it would allow more use for future structures on the remainder of the property.”

The architect asked what she had in mind.

“So I told them I had this dream of building a community pool, and they figured there was enough room for an aquatic complex there. I got to know Larry Davy really well during those years and Larry said he’d really like to build a community pool too, and that’s when we decided to partner up and try to build the pool together.”

Jett’s parents still live in the area; her dad, Ron Jett, is a former sheriff of Wallowa County and was an advocate of water safety. Wallowa County averages one drowning every year. Jett told his daughter that he and “some other old guys buy lottery tickets together in the hopes that they’d win enough to build a new pool to train people to swim.”

But constructing an aquatics center requires more than just building it, Chantay Jett said.

“What makes it complicated about it is the sustainability of it,” she said. “The structure itself is doable, but it’s really about how to sustain it, especially in a population of under 10,000. When we were thinking of this project I reached out to a number of different institutes such as the YMCA, to see if they would be interested in creating a pool complex in Wallowa County. They said they’d love to have a pool but it’s just really hard unless you have a sustainability plan that could support it; it just didn’t work for their business model.”

Jett said she was initially disheartened. “But then I started thinking about Cove, and Elgin, Baker City and all of the smaller areas, and they all have pools. So I really tried to dig in and learn a little bit more of what it takes to sustain a pool.”

Supporters of the project include county commissioner John Hillock, Wallowa Valley Center for Wellness Special Projects Director Autumn Wilburn, Center for Wellness Board Chairman Jim Nave and Kate Fent, Enterprise High School’s athletic director. They said support for the project appears to be growing — and so they concluded it’s time to see what the community wants in a pool and recreation facility.

A somewhat unexpected push for the project came when Wallowa Memorial Hospital’s Physical Therapy Department teamed up with Eagle’s View Inn and Suites to use the indoor pool there for water therapy. Davy said patients who were able to exercise in the pool started talking about the benefits of having a communitywide facility.

Davy and Jett emphasized that an aquatics center has to have broad support from the community.

“We’re not interested in just pushing something through that the community doesn’t want, but there has been a push from the community to see if we can figure this out,” Davy said.

“We are not going to try to make decisions for the community,” he said. “In my mind, it makes sense for me to have the community own it, just like they own the hospital, which is owned by around 7,400 (county residents) and I think that makes the most sense.”

“This is the very, very first step,” Jett said. “It’s just dipping our toes into the water, if you will, this is not a project we can do ourselves, it’s really a project for the community and there has to be community involvement in order to make it work.”

You can take the online survey about a possible aquatics center for Wallowa County by clicking on this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WAACS

In the 1940s, Wallowa County built an outdoor community pool on the edge of Enterprise City Park.

Community members and their families took swimming lessons there through the years, until it was deemed structurally deteriorated.

Studies were done about how to retrofit the facility, but the price tag was just too expensive to bring it back up to code. The pool was demolished in 2005. 

Shortly after the demolition, a group of citizens proposed the creation of a recreation district funded by property taxes; the measure failed on the ballot.

Wallowa Valley Center for Wellness is the designated community mental health program for the county. The center includes 17 different programs under one roof and also owns and operates three residential treatment facilities within Wallowa County. The organization has been around for more than 50 years.