As the future of the Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club continues to tread water, Flagler County School Board member Colleen Conklin is objecting to the way the district is accounting for the club’s revenue numbers and pointing to a shell game that has made the club’s balance sheet look much worse than it is.
“If I’m a member of this community, and looking at transparency, this says to me: you’re playing games, you’re putting money in one bucket and not money in another bucket and making a situation look far worse than it may look,” Conklin said at Tuesday’s workshop, which included two segments about the club, one of them focused on its umbrella division.
Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club is under the umbrella of the district’s Adult Education division, also known as Flagler Technical College. It runs its own operations separately from the district’s K-12 education programs. It includes extended day child care programs, adult education classes through Flagler Technical College, and the swim club.
But a few years ago the district cut out Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club’s budget to make it stand on its own, even though the club remained under the overall division’s umbrella. It did the exact reverse of what Palm Coast a few years ago did with its tennis and golf club, both of which were notorious very big money-losers, both of which had been stand-alone operations.
Several years ago the city folded the two operations into its larger, parks and recreation budget, redefining the two clubs as city amenities, like parks, where breaking even was not the primary motive anymore than it is at, say, Holland Park or Ralph Carter Park. The two club’s deficits have since been essentially erased, even though if the clubs again stood alone, their finances might still be precarious.
Conklin didn’t make a reference to Palm Coast’s strategy, but her aim was the same: the Belle Terre Club should be folded into its parent division, and its budget no longer singled-out, as if it were entirely a stand-alone operation.
Flagler Technical College (FTC) offers a range of classes, some that depend on the swim club–like Aqua Fusion, Aqua Splash, and others. But even though those classes generate revenue, that revenue is not made part of the club’s revenue in any way. It does not offset the club’s operational costs, even though, to Conklin, it should. That revenue, she said, “should be going to the Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club to offset costs of operations,” Conklin said. “They’re happening at the Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club. They’re utilizing those facilities.”
By denying the club that source of revenue, it’s essentially biased the books against the club. Similarly, a substantial salary that was charged to the club should have been under community education, as Conklin sees it.
“Other than membership we’ve pulled out all the revenue streams from Belle Terre Racquet Club over the last two to three years. And of course, when you put it on paper, it looks horrible,” Conklin said. “If we’re having these classes, and they’re generating revenue, either put Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club back under FTC’s umbrella along with the other community programs, or provide the revenue stream pieces to the facility.”
For instance, the facility at one point benefited from $75,000 a year in revenue from Flagler Fluid, the organization that had once been formed from within the district, as a district program, then forced by the district to be its own non-profit, which ended up hurting the facility’s bottom line.
To Furry, the club has to have its own budget separate from the rest of Adult Education, and if it doesn’t generate enough money to pay for its operations, then it’s a loss.
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“The bottom line is we have had programs a Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club that have helped that club break even,” Conklin said. “So now it looks like you’re taking all of these programs that are generating revenue and you’re separating them out for the last two years.”
Patty Wormeck, the district’s finance director, conceded that the arrangement has been “convoluted.” Going or ward, she said, “it’s a conversation with Superintendent [LaShakia] Moore as to how we want to structure these programs and if we want to combine them back together.”
School Board Chair Cheryl Massaro supports the re-combination. “It’s a community education program and community events. That’s where it belongs,” Massaro said of the swim club, falling back under FTC. “It being segmented out by itself never was right. Never happy about the way that was done. And it really should be back where it belongs.”
For all that, the district is moving ahead with board direction–and micromanagement from some–to raise fees at the club substantially, against the administration’s original advice. The club just held a weekend open house, waiving fees that weekend, in an effort to dispel the uncertainty some of the school board members had created about the club’s future. The event generated eight new memberships and 18 insurance-related users, who use the facility on a day to day basis.
The current all-access, all-amenities single-person membership is $300 a year. It’ll go up to $450. A family pass will go up to $750. For single parents with children, it’ll be $550 a year. A family consists of any two adults living in the same households, with children up to (and including) age 22.
“That’s a lot of money,” Massaro said. “That’s the concern that I have, that you’re going to lose members. I think people that have been there for years, you can’t build this off of the backs of the people that are current members. That’s the problem. They’re willing to pay. This is a huge difference.”
But gone will be the simplicity of memberships, which the administration had also favored. Instead–and at the insistence of Furry, the school board member–the club will now split membership types in two. One type of membership will give access to the gym and the hardly-ever used tennis courts. (Pickle ball may eventually draw more users: two of the three tennis cours are set up for pickle ball.) That’s the “basic membership.”
It’ll cost $250 per person on an annual basis, $25 per month. Students can get the membership for $150, or $15 a month.
The “aquatics plus” membership adds the pool and the sauna. Furry wanted the split approach as a way to capture more revenue from users who pay through their health insurance. There is a new, $50 “administrative fee” that all members will pay on either types of membership. Conklin and Massaro favored dropping that $50 fee for aquatics plus members. But Joshua Walker, the district’s point man on the club, cautioned that it would then have to be dropped as far as all insurance users are concerned. So the $50 fee stays.
The new fees will not go into effect until Sept. 1, 2023, assuming the board doesn’t alter them again. It is expected to adopt the new schedule at its July 25 meeting.
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