About 150 residents — mostly black — left City Hall in frustration Tuesday after the Wichita City Council voted to put off a decision on where to put a new swimming pool in northeast Wichita.
The decision to delay came after a three-hour debate that brought dozens of residents to the podium supporting McAdams Park — not Edgemoor Park — as the site where they want a new pool to be built.
The city closed the McAdams pool early last year and plans to close five other public pools by 2023. That would leave three pools open, plus a new pool, location to be determined. The Edgemoor pool closed several years ago because of structural problems.
Members of the audience spoke for nearly two hours, at five minutes each. Some fought back tears as they talked of the need for a pool in McAdams Park, serving a low-income area west of the I-135 freeway around 13th Street.
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