Once again, Powell families are waiting for the leisure pool and continuous river to reopen following repairs at the Powell Aquatic Center.

And, once again, city leaders are frustrated. More than ever this time around, as the timing couldn’t be worse.

With the end of the school year and start of summer, this would be one of the busiest weeks for the leisure pool. Instead, it has stood empty.

It seems that, no matter what city leaders do, problems continue to plague the aquatic center.

Most recently, bubbles underneath the recently-installed PVC liner prompted the leisure pool’s closure. Ironically, that is the liner that was supposed to be the end-all solution to previous aesthetic problems with the pool’s surface.

But, instead of the air bubbles the repair crew expected to find under the liner last week, they found water inside the bubbles. Then the crew left without providing information about the repairs and without answers to city officials’ questions.

That led city officials to assume the repairs were not completed yet; attempts for an answer from Aquatic Renovation Systems, which installed and repaired the liner, were unsuccessful until Tuesday. That was when they learned that the repairs had been completed and aquatic center staff could have begun refilling the the pool earlier in the week.

We hope the company’s repairs are better than its communication.

The silver lining to this particular cloud is that the liner has a 15-year warranty, and the city has not paid for its installation yet.

We’re thankful that the overall construction of the pool facility appears to be sound, and when the pools are open, the public enjoys them and uses them extensively.

The Powell Aquatic Center is a facility to be proud of, and residents from other communities comment on what a great place it is. We realize the Powell community is blessed to have an aquatic center of this quality, and we believe it was worth taxpayers’ investment.

Once the pool is filled and open again — this weekend, we hope — Powell residents will be able to enjoy and be proud of the aquatic center once more. Although the ongoing problems are very frustrating, dealing with them still is better than being without a swimming pool facility in town. We certainly hope this will be the last time a pool will need to be shut down for repairs for a very long time.