Save our pools

My former neighbors and still Phoenix Hill Neighborhood Association colleagues have been working with people in our neighborhood and the Irish Hill and Shelby Park neighborhoods (near where I volunteer to do people's taxes, in Smoketown) to raise money and push the city not to close the two urban pools for those neighborhoods (this after a string of other closures, including a recreation center in Phoenix Hill and a branch library in Shelby Park). These are all working-class, racially integrated neighborhoods. The city has not maintained/improved the pools very well, and attendance at at least some of that is down somewhat. At last week's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance/Louisville Asset Building Coalition celebration, I talked with one Shelby Park neighborhood activist whom the city had persuaded that the move makes sense, given the city's financial situation. Still, neighborhood groups and businesses have raised $30,000 so far to try to help keep these important pieces of neighborhood infrastructure and part of the city's youth programs and preventive health programs going, and I was one of a dozen activists at a protest/press conference at lunchtime outside of City Hall Thursday (along with one City Council member, a Republican who has fought against library expansion and for immigration crackdown but argued that the City has underinvested both in the Phoenix Hill area neighborhoods and in the SW Jefferson County neighborhoods in his district - but might also be interested in helping embarrass the Mayor. Tell the Mayor (who released a lean budget hurt by recession-triggered low tax revenue receipts - the same day) to helps us Save Our Pools.