SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
SAN BENITO — Eight years after voters passed a $40 million bond promising an $8.8 million aquatic center, the school district has officially jump-started the project, announcing Tuesday the unanimous hire of a firm whose first deliverable is a comprehensive list of things a pool contains.
“Swimming in San Benito begins tonight,” said district spokesperson Carla Zapata, gesturing at a projector slide labeled Deliverables. “It begins on paper. It begins with bullets. Everything wet comes later, per the list.”
The list — early drafts run nine pages — is expected to settle, once and for all, whether a pool requires water, how many lanes eight lanes is, and whether the warm-up pool, a smaller pool whose full-time job is warming up for the actual pool, will itself need an even smaller warm-up pool.
List Reportedly To Include Water, Lanes, In That Order
Officials promise the document will be exhaustive. Lane ropes. A ladder. A shallow end for the elementary lessons. A deep end for the lawsuits. The original plans called for 20,416 square feet, and the district insists every foot will be accounted for, ideally in list form.
“We toured the pool in Los Fresnos and it changed me,” said Trustee Roy Fuentes, who returned with 30 pages of notes. “They had lane ropes. Ropes, plural. I wrote it down before anyone could stop me.”
Funding Plan: $6 Million, Litigation, And Hope
About $6 million of the 2018 bond remains, with the rest of the pool expected to arrive via pending lawsuits, a revenue stream officials described as “a slow but dependable current.” The two structures built for roughly $12 million off Interstate 69 and abandoned in 2024 have been reclassified as pools that lacked the list, which by the district’s logic made them not pools but “very confident concrete.”
A site could be chosen by summer, possibly on land near Bobby Morrow Stadium. “Bobby ran 100 meters in about 10 seconds,” said Associate Superintendent of Fluid Planning Hank Salinas. “We believe we can describe 100 meters in under a decade.”
The swim team and elementary lessons will begin whenever the water does. The list will be laminated first, so it survives long enough to meet the pool.
FAQ
When will the pool open? After the list of pool contents is finished, followed by the list of things the list needs, followed by litigation proceeds. Current kindergarteners should begin training their kindergarteners now.
Why does it take a hired firm to list what a pool contains? Have you seen the last two? Clearly nothing around here is obvious.
