A question on worst-case scenarios

[mister_coffee]

When I started reading about this topic, one thing that stood out to me is that we aren't building very many public swimming pools in the United States, anywhere. And we haven't been for more than thirty years.

I've followed one project, which is similar in scale and imagined cost to what is proposed here:

https://piedmont.ca.gov/services___depa ... unity_pool

It is important to note that the city of Piedmont, CA has a considerably larger tax and population base than the proposed pool district will have. And even with all that and Piedmont being a very affluent community there have been a fair number of snags and snafus along the way.

Since is vanishingly unlikely that any contractor we retain for this project will have significant experience building a public pool, we should reasonably expect there to be snags and snafus -- which could easily translate into cost overruns. This leads to two conclusions:

1. There is a significant risk that we could be on the hook for all that money and not even get a pool.
2. Any managing body will need significant project management experience in order to understand the situation and prevent #1.