In a new twist on pay-to-play, residents in Dearborn’s Hemlock Park have petitioned the city of Dearborn to allow residents to decide whether they want to pay to keep their neighborhood pool open.

Hemlock Pool is one of two pools that city officials decided to close after the 2010 summer season in an attempt to bring municipal costs in line with available revenue.

If residents wanted to keep the pool open about 2,000 homes in the area would be assessed a tax of between $60 and $70 annually for the next decade for improvements and general maintenance to the pool.

A public meeting for residents in the Hemlock Park area is being held at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 26 at Hemlock Cabin concerning the pool’s future.

The meeting is intended as a public forum to provide information about the proposed future of Hemlock Pool. It will be hosted by Dearborn Recreation & Parks Department Director Greg Orner and include other city officials.

The meeting could be a contentious one, particularly since the city has been talking about budget issues and being forced to close pools and library branches to make ends meet but still managed to spend nearly $4 million to purchase a vacant building that it plans to convert into a new City Hall.

Residents in the Hemlock Park area, through a petition campaign, have indicated their interest in allowing area residents to vote on whether they would like to reopen the pool—after extensive redesign and modernization—by assuming financial responsibility for the facility.

As the next step in the process, the city has created a Special Assessment District (SAD), which includes approximately 2,000 residential parcels.

This Special Assessment District (SAD) encompasses the area from Warren to Wyoming, along the Detroit Terminal Railroad to Ford Road, west to Schaefer, north to Haggerty, west to Maple and north back to Warren.

The owners of these parcels will be asked if they are willing to assume responsibility for the capital improvements, maintenance and operation of the pool for the next 10 years at an annual cost of approximately $60-70 per household.

Initial capital improvements call for the modernization and reconfiguration of the pool into an L-shaped facility with a zero-depth entry at a cost of approximately $1.3 million.

If payments are assessed through the SAD, property owners within the district would not pay an entrance fee to use Hemlock Pool or pay for seasonal pool tags for Hemlock Pool.