Thursday evening your board of directors held a special meeting to deal with a situation involving our pool. The following is simply a short version of the state imposed problem.
A couple years ago a law was passed mandating a certain type drain for public swimming pools. Candlewick management contacted a major pool company to handle the project and bring our pool into compliance. This was completed and we were once again ready to go.
A few weeks ago the state of Illinois health department decided to make pool inspections and decided that our pool, along with probably hundreds of others are not in compliance after all. We received a notice indicating a fine was being imposed of $44,000.00 plus of course we had to again have our pool drain changed.
This gets better, the state indicated if we would just send them a check for $5,000 and not demand a hearing they would drop the matter as long as we again fixed the drain. Our legal fees could top the $5,000 fine in an appeal and even with the papers indicating we had spent the money to fix the problem two years ago we could still lose. We were left with no real choice but to authorize payment to the cash starved state of Illinois and we will pursue recovery from the pool company who supposedly had already handled the job. That process is about to begin.
With Illinois in last place or close to it in financial solvency they are grabbing every penny possible from every source. Hang onto your wallets as they will do anything to take your funds to finance their spending. Kind of makes you proud of our state doesn’t it. Tax, fine, and spend should be the state motto. Sad.
Ken Dillenburg