This post was originally published by The Belfast, Maine Conversation. To receive regular coverage from the Belfast, Maine Conversation, sign up for a free subscription here.
Belfast is heading into the Fourth of July holiday, and two things are happening at once.
School has been out for two weeks. Maine’s summer is short. The Fourth of July is rapidly approaching. Six of the last seven days have seen temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And for the second year in a row, the City Park pool is not open at the start of summer. Last year, it did not open until Aug. 8.
City Hall is also in the middle of another shortened three-day public-access week.
So here we are. It is summer, the pool is closed, and City Hall is barely open.
How the city handles pool communication and holiday closures both say something about how Belfast treats public access.
When Belfast changed City Hall to a Monday-through-Thursday schedule in 2020, the explanation was employee morale and recruitment. It was not sold as a limited-access device. Four-day workweeks are more common now, but the five-day workweek has not disappeared from American life. And many employers that use compressed schedules still stagger days off so services remain available when the public expects them to be available.
City Hall is now closed every Friday, which means the public lost 20% of normal weekday access before holidays. Belfast’s holiday schedule then moves all Friday, Saturday and Sunday holidays into the Monday-through-Thursday public week. In 2026, that creates 12 three-day public weeks and one two-day public week.
That means one quarter of the year now has reduced public access before vacation time, sick time, training, comp time, weather closures, or anything else closes the building or departments.
That part was not really sold to the public: Belfast was creating a system where an already-short access schedule gets shorter whenever the calendar allows.
Don’t get me wrong. Good schedules can help morale, retention and recruitment. But a public employee benefit still needs a public-side offset.
If Belfast had moved to a four-day City Hall week while maintaining broad public access, staggering staff coverage, answering questions quickly and communicating service disruptions reliably, we’d barely notice. That would be a win-win: better schedules for employees, with no meaningful loss of service for residents.
The employee-side arrangement now looks strong: competitive pay, great benefits, stipends, merit increases on top of cost-of-living increases and compensation packages that no longer fit the old image of the underpaid public servant making sacrifices for the public good. Some administrative and department positions, even assistant directors, now pay at or above six figures. On paper, Belfast appears to be a very good place to be a city employee.
But on the public side, the offset is hard to find, while holiday observances are given the most generous interpretation possible for employees, because the public sees no staggered coverage maintaining public access and no unusually clear communication to compensate.
In a city that, as of 2024, was the second-most property-tax-burdened in Maine relative to income, that bargain looks one-sided: pay more, get less.
So City Hall is barely open this week. And with the 210,000-gallon pool still unfilled as of June 30, it is hard to see how Belfast opens it for the holiday.
Residents have been asking when it will open. Some say they contacted Parks and Recreation and were told to keep checking the city’s page for updates. There still has not been a plain public explanation.
Former Belfast mayor and councilor Michael Hurley put it succinctly in a Facebook discussion last week: “the public has a right to expect a budgeted long term asset and service should be open when it is summer.”
The people asking when the pool will open are not asking for a capital schedule. They are not asking for an engineering report. They do not need a council discussion. They are asking a well-compensated, well-staffed city administration a simple question: When will the damn pool open?
Last Thursday morning, this publication sent a brief press inquiry to the mayor, the city manager, and the parks and recreation director asking when the pool will open, why it is not open and what needs to happen before an opening date is set.
Five days later, the only news publication based in Belfast has received no response.
The inquiry was not accusatory. This publication framed it plainly: No one expects perfect mechanical performance from a 52-year-old public pool. Mechanical things break. Concrete pools crack and leak. Repairs take time.
This was a request that needed only a two-minute public response. It was also a journalistic softball. The city has had plenty of time to explain this on its own. A short press release, a website update or even a plain Facebook post issued in the interim would have made this article unnecessary.
The point is the pool is empty and the city knows it is not opening tomorrow. If it needs a pump, a part, inspection, staffing or state licensing, why not say so?
In a normal civic environment, where government wants to foster trust, it would feel some obligation to say so.
But that is not 2026 Belfast under this administration.
Here and now, residents are left to ask each other on Facebook.
If this were a one-off, it would be annoying. But Belfast repeatedly struggles to explain itself to the public, and does not even seem to feel that informing the public directly about what’s going on is part of civic responsibility.
When information does come out, it usually moves up to the council, if a councilor cares to ask, in meetings very few residents watch. It does not reliably move outward to the public in plain language.
This is when a communications failure starts to look like contempt for the public. Not because the pool is still closed, but because the city seems unconcerned with explaining why and when to the people paying for it.
Last year was not a normal pool season either. The pool eventually opened Aug. 8 and closed Sept. 14, in the middle of a period of turnover in the Parks and Recreation Department that has seen four directors hold the position in three years. The city paid for $68,000 in repairs to late-discovered cracks that had allowed water to leak from the basin. Whether the problem was missed preventive maintenance, unforeseen winter damage, department turnover or some combination of all of it, the result was the same: a public pool problem surfaced too late and came with a real cost in service and money.
So while the pool did open, residents lost most of the season and spent the summer speculating while snippets of explanation trickled out at council meetings.
The pool is not some kind of favor or nice-to-have. It is a public asset. Belfast owns it, budgets for it, repairs it and plans to spend more on it. Known recent and planned pool costs now total $520,000, including last year’s leak-patching repair authorization and future work for plumbing, bathhouse repairs, stairs, basin work, an ADA lift and basin plaster.
The larger question is this: Why is Belfast spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a 52-year-old public pool while still failing to tell the public what condition the asset is in, what the long-term plan is, and why residents are again waiting for basic information at the start of summer for the second year in a row?
The immediate question is even simpler: When will the pool open?