Sascha Wil­son

With COVID-19 cas­es on the rise again, San Fer­nan­do East MP Bri­an Man­ning yes­ter­day as­sured that the nec­es­sary pro­to­cols and ster­il­i­sa­tion will be done at the re­opened pub­lic swim­ming pool at Co­coyea Vil­lage, San Fer­nan­do.

The Co­coyea Recre­ation­al Fa­cil­i­ty, which had been closed for al­most five years, re­opened on Mon­day and yes­ter­day Man­ning and oth­er of­fi­cials toured the fa­cil­i­ty at St An­drew’s Park West.

Fol­low­ing its clo­sure in 2018, there were sev­er­al com­plaints, par­tic­u­lar­ly from res­i­dents of Co­coyea Vil­lage and neigh­bour­ing com­mu­ni­ties.

Deputy Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Sport and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Bev­er­ly Reid-Samuel said at a cost of $1,137,000, re­pairs were done to sev­er­al ar­eas in­clud­ing the roof, bleach­ers, plumb­ing, elec­tri­cal and pumps in two phas­es from June to Au­gust 2022 and from last Sep­tem­ber to Jan­u­ary 6.

The pool was orig­i­nal­ly opened in Au­gust 2007 by Man­ning’s fa­ther, the late prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, who was the MP for San Fer­nan­do East.

Bri­an Man­ning, Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, said the fa­cil­i­ty was kept closed un­til they were ab­solute­ly sure it was safe for pub­lic use. He thanked Sports Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe for work­ing with his con­stituen­cy of­fice to en­sure the pool was re­opened.

“We had var­i­ous is­sues with pumps at one pe­ri­od. There was al­so an al­gae is­sue at one point so we had to en­sure that all of that was tak­en care of, then of course there was COVID. It would not have been safe for the pub­lic to use the pool dur­ing that time, so we had to en­sure that every­thing was done cor­rect­ly. Every­thing was done prop­er­ly to en­sure the safe­ty of the pub­lic be­fore we of­fi­cial­ly opened this fa­cil­i­ty.”

Asked about con­cerns with the rise of COVID-19 cas­es, he said: “We will take the nor­mal pre­cau­tions. There is al­so a vac­ci­na­tion pol­i­cy now which was a ques­tion ear­li­er on dur­ing the ear­ly part of the COVID cri­sis, so we will take nor­mal pre­cau­tions and have reg­u­lar ster­il­i­sa­tion and clean­ing of the area to min­imise the risk of COVID and any oth­er vi­ral in­fec­tion in this fa­cil­i­ty.”

Man­ning said he was ex­treme­ly proud to be part of the re­open­ing as it was one of his fa­ther’s pet projects for the peo­ple of Co­coyea Vil­lage.

“It is one of those projects that the mem­bers of San Fer­nan­do East feel ex­treme­ly emo­tion­al about. I re­mem­ber I got a let­ter from one par­tic­u­lar res­i­dent who was or­gan­is­ing a protest to have the pool re­opened. I had to in­form the gen­tle­man we could not re­open the pool un­til we were ab­solute­ly sure it was safe for use,” he said.

Fa­cil­i­ty man­ag­er Kim­ber­ly Joseph said the pool is free of charge to mem­bers of the pub­lic. This week there will on­ly be recre­ation­al swim­ming but from next week there will be aqua aer­o­bics for se­nior cit­i­zens, swim­ming class­es and schools will be in­vit­ed to use the pool.

Joseph said sev­er­al swim­ming clubs have asked to use the fa­cil­i­ties but they are still in talks with them.

The re­open­ing was a nos­tal­gic mo­ment for for­mer coun­cil­lor for the area Leslie Lynch who was at the open­ing in 2007. His daugh­ter, cur­rent coun­cil­lor for Co­coyea/Tarou­ba Tere­sa Lynch, was in at­ten­dance along with con­stituen­cy chair­man Pa­tri­cia Alex­is and Mon Re­pos/Navet coun­cil­lor Nigel Cout­ti­er.