Share This Article
Thirty-seven years after a small group of swim advocates cut the ribbon on the Cooper Park pool, two of those same women stood beside Mayor Hillrey Adams on Friday and helped him open the Mountain Home Community and Aquatic Center.
The facility is now fully open to the public.
For Adams, Friday’s ceremony marked the closing of a circle that began in his first months in office in 2019, when a delegation of swim advocates appeared on his calendar and told him Mountain Home needed a new pool. It also marked the delivery of a project that, for years, residents told him would never get built.
“We’ve been waiting a long, long time for this,” Adams told the crowd gathered under the building’s entry canopy. “Some folks a lot longer than others.”
Adams said his chief of staff, Tina Gregory, explained the names on his calendar that first week.
“She said, ‘Mayor, those are the ladies that come see every new mayor and say we need a new pool. We need it covered. We need it heated,’” Adams recalled. “I’ve got some of those ladies right here with us today. They’re the reason we started this.”
Kay Wilson and Shirley Porter, who cut the ribbon at the Cooper Park pool in August 1989, took the scissors again Friday. They were joined at the ribbon line by members of the city council, the swim advocates, the pickleball players who pushed for the facility, and the Mountain Home Public Schools Naval Junior ROTC color guard. Lori Gregory sang the national anthem. Vince Daniel of Realist Church delivered the invocation.
Adams traced the city’s pool history back further than 1989. In August 1956, voters passed a $60,000 bond issue to build the original pool at Hickory Park, which opened the following summer and served the city for 32 years before Cooper Park replaced it.
“Today, 37 years after we opened Cooper Park, we’re going to open this one up,” Adams said. “I hope I’m not here in 37 more years to go through this project again. I might.”
A turning point at McCabe Park
Adams said his decision to push for a comprehensive parks overhaul did not come from the swim ladies, the pickleball players, or the softball and baseball families who filled his office that first year. It came from a lawnmower.
Driving past the ponds at McCabe Park one afternoon, Adams said, he saw a zero-turn mower sitting unattended in the grass with no worker in sight. He called then-Parks Director Billy D. Austin to ask what was going on.
“He said, ‘Mayor, if they can start that thing, they can have it,’” Adams recalled. The parks department, Austin told him, owned 12 mowers. Three of them were more than 17 years old. Crews spent winters keeping the equipment alive and most of the summer doing the same. The department had no real operating budget.
“All these people did is work on them during the wintertime and most of the summertime,” Adams said. “They had no funds to run the parks department with. That right there probably had as much to do with me making my mind up that we need to fix the parks department.”
The city council called a special election to fund a parks sales tax in 2020. Then COVID-19 hit, and the vote was shelved.
Adams told two new council members seated that November to be ready. The first agenda item of 2021 would be calling the election again.
“The number one thing on the agenda is to call a special election. We’re going for it,” Adams said he told the council. “We can’t wait on this COVID deal to be over with.”
It passed by 47 votes.
“Thank God for those 47 people that got us over that hill,” Adams said. The campaign cost the supporting committee $1,900. Volunteers from the East program at Mountain Home High School built the graphics and walked door-to-door. The morning after the vote, Adams said, his first stop was the high school to thank them.
“Most of them were juniors and seniors,” Adams said. “I told them, ‘We’re going to get this thing built. You won’t be here to see it in school. Thanks for your help. Come back in a few years.’ I hope some of them got to make it back today.”
The tax began collecting in July 2021. Road construction into the new facility started in spring 2023. The Mountain Home Street Department broke ground that December. On Dec. 14, 2024, project superintendent Chance Gregory placed a Christmas tree on top of the rising steel.
Before the aquatic center, the tax paid for tarping the baseball and softball fields at Keller and McCabe parks and funded the all-inclusive playground at Hickory Park, which Adams said is the project he is most proud of.
“You get a call one day from a lady in Ava, Missouri,” Adams said. “She said, ‘Mayor, thank you for that park. I’ve got a 10-year-old son that’s never in his life been in a swing because he was confined to a wheelchair.’ To me, that’s why we do what we do right there when you get that message.”
Scale of the build
Adams used part of his remarks to walk the crowd through what is actually inside the building behind him.
The facility contains more than 38,000 concrete blocks, he said, and more than 4,000 cubic yards of concrete in the building pad and pools alone. The pools hold more than 1 million gallons of water. The window contractor, Dunbar Hardware of Mountain Home, installed 1,154 panes, a number the city only learned because Parks Director Daniel Baxley needed a quote to clean them.
Crawford Electric installed 16 miles of conduit and 330,000 feet of wire, Adams said, the equivalent of running a line from Mountain Home to Hardy, past Harrison, and beyond. Low-voltage cable runs through the building on top of that, including more than 4.5 miles of cable feeding roughly 120 security cameras.
“Sixteen miles of conduit gets you to the Missouri line and back,” Adams said. “That’s a lot of wire.”
ETC Engineers handled design. Tom Davenport Concrete of Yellville did the concrete work. Adoring Glass and Northeast Glass of Jonesboro handled the glazing. MPS Gold Mechanical handled mechanical systems.
Adams credited Will Gregory and the Gregory construction team as the people most responsible for finishing the project, calling Chance Gregory by name and noting his absence Friday as he recovers from an accident. Adams also asked the crowd to keep Baxley’s assistant Megan Engler in their prayers following the recent death of her father.
A mentor in Batesville
Adams repeatedly credited Batesville Mayor Rick Elumbaugh, who attended Friday’s ceremony, as the mentor who made the project possible.
Elumbaugh’s city built a similar aquatic facility years earlier, and Adams said he and his team made repeated trips to Batesville to study how it worked. Elumbaugh came to Mountain Home during the 2021 campaign, sitting through a public hearing at Dunbar Elementary and recording radio spots in support of the tax.
“When Rick told me what they had to do in Batesville to get it passed, I said, ‘Oh my God, we can’t afford that,’” Adams said. The Mountain Home campaign spent $1,900 total and won by 47 votes.
“When Will Gregory says, ‘I’m just going to call Jeff and ask him,’ he knows the answer,” Adams said, referring to Batesville Parks Director Jeff Owens. “We don’t need to talk to anybody else. We just go to Jeff.”
Adams recruited Baxley after former director Billy D. Austin retired shortly after the sales tax passed. A contact in Jonesboro pointed Adams toward a contractor in Benton building a similar facility called Riverside, where Baxley was working as the No. 2. The two men met during a Benton tour. Baxley took the Mountain Home job and has run the project since.
Adams handed Baxley a framed certificate of occupancy Friday, joking that the document would make the building legal to use.
What it means for Mountain Home
It is not the first time Adams has been told a building could not be built in Mountain Home.
Before he was mayor, Adams served as postmaster and pushed for the construction of the city’s current post office, which opened in 1998 over skepticism that the project could be pulled off. The fire station that opened last year, Sharp Family Station 2, was the second building Adams said he has helped open in Mountain Home. The aquatic center is the third.
The same person sang the national anthem at all three openings.
For Adams, Friday delivered something he was repeatedly told he could not deliver: an indoor, heated, year-round aquatic and recreation facility in a city the size of Mountain Home, paid for with a sales tax that passed by fewer votes than fit in a single row of the new bleachers.
The building gives Mountain Home its first indoor competition and recreation pool, an indoor pickleball complex, basketball courts, and meeting space, all under one roof on the McCabe Park property the city has been steadily reshaping since the original parks plan took hold. It gives the swim community a year-round home for the first time in the city’s history. It gives the pickleball players, who Adams called “some of the loudest folks in the world,” a venue built for them rather than borrowed from somewhere else.
It also closes the gap Adams described at the start of his remarks: a 37-year stretch in which a small group of women kept walking into mayors’ offices asking for what Mountain Home finally got Friday.
Wilson and Porter, who cut the ribbon at the Cooper Park pool 37 years ago, cut this one too.
“So folks, at this time,” he said, “if anybody would like to go swimming, if you’d like to go play pickleball, if you’d like to go play basketball, if you’d like to do anything, help yourself. We are wide open now.”
