Who Paid for the Cascade Pool?

1965 was a very eventful year. For six weeks, I walked two blocks from Grannie O’Neill’s to Clarke College in the rain while the Mississippi flooded downtown Dubuque. Clarke, Loras, and high school students were recruited to fill sand bags and make sandwiches.

 Early in ‘65, the Cascade City Council—Carl Cigrand, Merly Dolphin, Bob Kurt, Bill Talbert and Dr. Tom White—assessed citizens for curb and gutter and was dealing with an ice jam that necessitated meeting with the county supervisors and Army Corps of Engineers. They wanted to blast it out, but were nervous about what else might get blasted. At a special meeting in mid-March they adopted permanent remedies to guard against such problems in the future. 

Nonetheless, on Apr. 6^th, the five decided to apply to the Iowa Comptroller to transfer $70,000 from the Cascade Utility having received a petition signed by 210 people to build a pool. On May 5^th  citizens went to the polls and voted 374 to 39 to build it. Later that month Council did a trade with Legion: land on the edge of the Legion Park for updating the existing tennis courts—then located just north of the pool, plus a water main to near 3^rd base.

On July 28, 1965, the council accepted the bid of $69,200 By Pascal P. Paddock to build  the pool. For the balance of the year at regular and special meetings council worked out the kinks. On Sept. 7^th Council paid the first installment $31,652 for the pool and on Nov. 1, the 2^nd of $17,043.

The following year council set a special election for April to establish a park board to run the pool.  It passed and on June 6^th Cliff Less, John Sullivan and Herb Green were named to the Cascade Park Board. The 3^rd installment was paid Paddock was $5,000.

The Cascade Municipal Pool opened the first Sat. of June 1966 with no citizen having donated a dime. On June 28^th the pool balance of $2,896 was paid to Paddock.

Aside from astonishingly low cost of installing the ’65 pool, the real take-away here is that NO citizen was hit up for even a dime for it. I have long advocated stronger city/citizen control of the Utility for years for just this reason. So far the Utility has donated only $2,743.04. What have we done with city money? Keep checking back here, Critical Eye is looking into it.