Montvale’s Mayor and Council meeting made the decision on June 28 to close the Montvale Swim Club indefinitely, due to lack of financial and community support. The news reports state that the pools will be turned into a new recreational grass field.

Mayor Michael Ghassali said, “Problems with the construction of the pool and the committee that was taking care of the town’s pools had to abandon it.” The pools’ condition is almost unusable.

Montvale was not able to release the land back to the private board, so the town had to make the difficult decision deciding what they will do with the land.

The lack of community and financial support caused the board to have to chose to close the pools and turn the land into new community fields. The Montvale citizens can now chose to join either the Park ridge or Woodcliff Lake swim club, for an annual fee of $510 with no bond.

Freshman Fatima Medina, former member of the Montvale Swim Club, states, “It’s really sad [that the pools are closing] because everyone enjoyed spending their time at the club. Everyone had fun there and now they can’t experience that.”

There is still a possibility of getting a new community pool, but it not something that is planned for the near future.

Ghassali says, “We will have a field and if somehow we have someone who wants to donate or we have some different source of revenue that we can pump $2-3 million into the pool, than we will have the field and it would only be the matter of going back and rebuilding it.”

On the new community field there is hopes to put a soccer and volleyball courts on the property. “It is going to be on the schedule so if people want to use it for games we will have nine fields on the schedule and they can put their names on the schedule”, Ghassali says.

The financial aspect is a large reason of why the pool will not be reopened. The estimated cost of rebuilding the pools would be around two to three million dollars.

Ghassali said, “Developers when they come into build we charge them a fee that goes to an Open Space Fund for things like this. We can use the money to build the fields but we can’t use the money to support the pool.”