Hi MP City Council-
My name is Eric Kinney. I have lived in Menlo Park for about 25 years.
I have owned properties in Linfield, the Willows and for the last decade on Oakland in the Flood Triangle.
I strongly encourage you to follow the advice of the City staff and extend the pool operations contract to Tim Sheeper and his team.
I am more of a runner by back ground (in College) and have never had formal swimming lessons. I started lap swimming about 2 decades ago at Burgess because age prohibited me from running 7 days a week.
Eventually I joined Menlo Masters and have been swimming with the MM community for about 15+ years. MM is a great community! Even though I am not able to do proper breast stroke nor backstroke I have fit in well with our diverse team and have found myself competing in marathon open water events.
Tim Sheeper-
Tim’s team is local, professional, friendly, energetic, organized, well trained and focus on safety first.
We have tangible experience and many letters of support to base our decision.
Swan LLC-
Swan LLC is not local. This is a big issue for me. I’d like to see MP funds stay local and not shipped down South.
The 10AM start time (a few days a week) would impact a lot of people that use the pool before 10.
I do not think that Swan did enough out reach nor did they customize their proposal. Let’s see how they do in Gilroy and look them up in 5 years.
Comments on Solo-
Solo does not nearly have the necessary experience to run multiple pools nor the programs that MP needs. Besides they want to open the pool at 5 AM through 10 PM. As a former home owner in Linfield there is already too much cut through traffic and those additional hours would not work for me if I still lived in that neighborhood.
Solo is local and has a great program. We swim next to them Saturday mornings when we do our 10K swims. Their coaches and swimmers are engaged and friendly.
City Run pool-
Please do not consider this option. Adding more fixed long term costs does not make sense as a resident and tax payer.
Overall summary-
Let’s keep the pool operations local and with Tim.
The disruption to service and in experience would not be risks that I would want to accept.
Thank you.
Eric Kinney
Sent from my iPhone
