Town finance director takes aim at Coomes Recreation Center deficit | Local News

Abingdon’s Financial Director Steve Trotman recently presented numbers to the Abingdon Town Council showing it costs more than $1 million a year to operate the 28-year-old, two-story center — with an annual deficit of about $750,000.

“We don’t print money here.” Trotman said. “We’re trying to balance the budget. And I let the Town Council know that there are certain things that have deficit spending.”

Comparably speaking, however, the center also carried a deficit of about $818,000 to the town in 2018-2019 — the last normal year before the COVID-19 pandemic, Trotman said.

Melisha Wynne directs operations at the Coomes Recreation Center — a post she has held since 2021. Yet she calls the services of the center, “a team effort,” after having climbed the ranks, rising from her beginnings as a part-time lifeguard in 2005.

The center employs approximately 35 full- and part-time employees, depending on the season.

“It takes quite a bit of staffing to make sure that we’re up and running,” Wynne said. “And our facility is starting to age, so we’re having to make repairs and upgrades.”

The Coomes Center features two swimming pools, a playground, walking track, tennis courts, pickle ball courts and basketball courts.

“Our town residents utilize the facility as well as people in the surrounding communities,” Wynne said. “And we do have programs that we work with the local bed and breakfasts. If they take advantage of that, their guests can utilize the facility.”

Various tiers of memberships are available. For adults, town residents pay $150 for a yearly pass while out-of-town residents pay $280 a year.

The daily fee rate is $5, which includes access to the outdoor pool and, at times, the indoor pool — depending on scheduled programs, Wynne said. “You can utilize both bodies of water, the weight room and walking track.”

Less than an hour north of Abingdon, the town of Wytheville, Virginia, boasts a nearly identical population count — about 8,000 residents, according to the 2020 census.

Wytheville opened a dual-purpose building spanning 100,000 square feet in 2007.

Half of the facility houses a meeting facility that attracts as many as 700 meetings and 50,000 visitors a year.

The other half — more comparable to Abingdon’s Coomes Center — features exercise equipment and a large indoor swimming pool with a miniature water park. The recreation portion — known as the Wytheville Community Center — attracts about 100,000 visitors each year, Rosa Lee Jude, the director of public information and tourism for Wytheville, said.

It costs $3,297,411 to operate the facility each year, while revenues generate $2,533,326 — with an annual deficit of about $1 million paid by the town’s general fund.

Various annual passes are sold with Wytheville town residents getting a 10% discount. Daily passes are $6.50.

Town leaders designed the center to be “a huge quality of life tool,” Jude said. “We really had no meeting space here. So we looked to combine these two.”

To help pay for the center, the town raised both meals and lodging taxes by two cents.

“Tourism is one of our top five sources of revenue here. This is one of the reasons why we invested in a meeting center,” Jude said. “We looked at this complex that would be a game-changer for our community on many levels. And it would give us a recreation facility that would be phenomenal for our citizens.”

In Washington County, Tennessee, the small city of Jonesborough — with a population of less than 6,000 — is home to the Wetlands Water Park. It opened in 1994, the same year that the Coomes Recreation Center opened in Abingdon.

Located away from Jonesborough’s picture-perfect downtown district, Wetlands Water Park features a lazy river, water slides and a swimming area. Wetlands regularly draws visitors from Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, attracting about 20,000 to 25,000 visitors a year, Dillon Stout, the assistant recreation director for Jonesborough, said.

Admission is $10 for children and $12 for adults. Season passes start at $60.

“We operate at a profit pretty much every single year,” Stout said, “But the last few years have been crazy with COVID. It really does depend on the season.”

The park operates from May to September with a budget of about $383,000 a year, Craig Ford, operations manager for the town of Jonesborough, said. “A good chunk of that are food concessions.”

Ford recalled only one year when the park lost moony — due to excessive rain, he said. “And it wasn’t’ a huge deficit.”

The Coomes Center was closed for about a year due to coronavirus concerns. Prior to the pandemic hitting in 2020, the Coomes Center boasted a larger membership base — with 16,937 daily passes sold in 2018-19 compared to about half that in 2021-22, Trotman said.

Membership passes totaled 907 for town residents and 2,351 for others during 2018-2019 compared to the current total membership of 439 town residents who have purchased passes this year and 837 for others.

“We’re still rebuilding from the pandemic,” Wynne said.

“The pandemic wreaked havoc on membership, and we’re trying to play catch-up,” Trotman said.

Possibly, an increase in fees could help cover expenses at the Coomes Center, Trotman said.

“The recommendation would be we probably need to take a close look at our fees,” he said. “Are we comparable, and yet competitive, with comparable facilities in that area and see if our fees are in line?”

Now, as the town finalizes its budget and welcomes a new town manager this month, the deficit to operate the center remains a challenge to Trotman.

“It would be up to the new town manager to decide if the fees would have to be increased,” Trotman said. “It’s a very nice facility for a town this size, and it’s a quality of life amenity — not just for the town residents but the county residents and the visitors alike.”