Cranston's Budlong Pool may be closed, but it's taking center stage in the mayor's race

CRANSTON – This summer, for the fifth year in a row, the Budlong Pool will remain closed.

And the image of one of the largest public pools in America sitting empty, unused and filled with murky green-brown water seems almost destined to end up on a political mailer attacking Mayor Ken Hopkins.

Hopkins, a Republican facing a tough reelection campaign this year, intends to replace the existing pool with one that would be about a third of its size. He's still moving forward with that plan, which has been highly controversial.

But in a recent news release, he said that he expects the new pool to open in summer 2025 – not this summer, as he'd originally hoped.

"While our best efforts to see an opening this summer may be delayed, we will have planned a summer program and schedule of water related activities for Cranston families and children," he said.

Bids from potential contractors are due on March 5, Hopkins said, and construction should break ground "soon."

Republicans feud over 'fiasco'

Rep. Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung, who is challenging Hopkins in the Republican primary, said it should have been "obvious to anyone who knows anything about public project management" that the new pool wouldn't open this summer.

"The Budlong Pool fiasco is just another example of the Hopkins administration not really having a comprehensive understanding of the situation, over-promising and again under-delivering for the families of Cranston," she said.

The result, she added, "is that the children of Cranston will once again go without a place to cannonball and cool off on a 95-degree day."

Fenton-Fung's husband, former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, famously celebrated the opening of the pool each year by jumping in while dressed in a suit. But for the entire time Hopkins has been in office, the pool has remained closed all summer long.

At first, the pandemic was to blame. But in 2022, Hopkins announced that the pool was in poor condition and couldn't safely open – a claim that some Cranston residents, including a number of Democratic politicians and activists, still have doubts about.

Hopkins, who was Fung's hand-picked successor, steered clear of placing any blame on his predecessor. But that was before a rift emerged – and now he says that he inherited a "neglected" pool that hadn't been seriously overhauled since 1997.

In a statement, Hopkins claimed that previous mayors had simply relied on "short-term fixes" to get through each summer.

"The Fenton-Fung Way was to do whatever they could to get water in the pool for their annual photo of the mayor jumping in the pool as they headed out campaigning for governor in Middletown or Charlestown or Woonsocket," he said.

Fenton-Fung is "too inexperienced and politically ambitious" to understand the concept of properly managing tax dollars, Hopkins added. He accused his rival of engaging in political grandstanding, "like every other politician who has no answers or positive solutions."

"We have always said a pool opening this year was going to be tight," he said.

More: When a pool is more than a pool: How Cranston's Budlong Pool became a political lightning rod

Mayor accuses Democratic rival of 'political theater'

Democrats, who hold a majority on the Cranston City Council, have vehemently opposed replacing the Budlong Pool with a scaled-down version.

But Councilman Robert Ferri, who's also planning to challenge Hopkins, told The Providence Journal he doesn't plan to make the pool a major campaign issue.

In 2022, the council allocated $4 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for reopening the Budlong Pool. Hopkins subsequently announced plans to replace it with a smaller pool, and Ferri now says that it was a mistake not to put tighter restrictions on the use of those funds.

The council is powerless to stop Hopkins from moving forward with his vision for a new pool, Ferri said.

But that doesn't mean that Democrats have lost interest – or that the drama has died down. In a recent news release, Hopkins said Ferri "showed up with one of his political supporters and a photographer in tow" at a pre-bid conference for potential contractors this month.

Hopkins accused Ferri of injecting "political theater" into the event, claiming that the councilman "asked uninformed questions" about water that was being drained from the pool.

"In a strange coincidence, shortly after Mr. Ferri departed the site with his entourage, the city received a call from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management," Hopkins said "The staff was doing nothing wrong with the pool draining and promptly replied to the surprise call without issue."

Ferri told The Journal that he went to the public meeting "out of curiosity, to see what was going on." He noticed water from the pool being pumped into a neighboring creek, and asked the city's parks and recreation director about it, he said.

"Evidently, somebody called the DEM – and it wasn't Robert Ferri," he said. "And the DEM went there and shut it down."

Susan Blake, an activist who has been pushing to reopen the pool and also attended the pre-bid conference, subsequently told The Journal that she made the call. In an email, she said that she was "aghast" to see stagnant water being emptied into a stream that eventually feeds into the Pocasset River.

So was there a problem or not? Discharging water from a chlorinated pool requires a special permit, DEM spokesman Michael Healey confirmed. But in this case, the city's parks and recreation department "stated that they were pumping rainwater, not chlorinated pool water, that had accumulated in the pool over much time."

The agency "directed that instead they discharge the rainwater onto a grassy or vegetated area, which is a best-management practice in case there is sediment, leaves, algae, etc., in the water," Healey wrote in an email. "Although it is not a violation to pump rainwater, Parks and Rec said they’d shut the pumping down immediately."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Mayor Ken Hopkins accuses opponents of 'political theater' over Budlong Pool