The City of Sherbrooke officially opened the new beach-style pool at Centennial Park in Lennoxville on Wednesday morning, giving the local community access to the newly redesigned swimming space and integrated splash pad for the first time this summer.
Completed at a cost of $1,895,000, the work represents a complete reinvention of the municipal pool. The former building and basin, which dated back to the 1970s, have been removed and replaced with new service and utility buildings alongside a pool with a sloped bottom that allows users to walk directly into the water up to a maximum depth of 1.4 metres.
“This is more than a renovation,” said Remi Demers, Deputy Mayor of Sherbrooke, marking the extent of the work at a short ceremony on Tuesday afternoon. In addition to celebrating the news for the local community, the deputy mayor also noted that this is the second beach-style pool to open in the city in recent years.
Lennoxville Borough President Claude Charron pointed out that the efforts to get something done about the pool date back to 2012, when the city’s ombudsman declared the facilities to be in embarrassingly poor condition. Although various repairs and modifications were made over the eight years since, the project to rebuild the pool didn’t begin until the end of the swimming season last year.
Although the goal had been to reopen the pool at the same time as all other city pools on June 20, the completion schedule was set back slightly by the halt on construction work this spring.
