Pool maintenance contract issues

I would like to know if other boards are signing swimming pool maintenance contracts in which the maintenance company is asking to be held harmless if certain adverse events occur at the pool. We are finding this in our contract proposals and the board has had some disagreement over this. We are a very small community and, thus, have no lifeguards or staff, so we require the maintenance company to perform the three-times-a-day water monitoring necessary to meet local health department requirements. This severely narrows the number of contractors who are willing to perform such intricate services at a reasonable price. So it means we accept the hold-harmless clause, or hire lifeguards or staff to do the monitoring, or pay thousands of dollars more for companies willing to drop the clause, or we close the pool for the swimming season. The last one, of course, is not a viable option.

Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thanks!

I thought it was a bit much myself, so I looked it up and it is in the New York State Health Code.

" Test kits/Testing. DPD test kits with reagents no more than one year old capable of measuring pH and chlorine or bromine residuals, shall be available at each pool. Tests shall be conducted and recorded for pH and free and total chlorine or bromine residual at the beginning, during, and at the end of each swimming period. Where required, reagents for alkalinity and hardness tests shall be available. Where ozone generating equipment is installed, ozone testing shall be conducted in accordance with section 6-1.29, Item 11.5.1.1 of this Subpart."....

Seems excessive. But if that's what they require, doesn't seem like a cheap way around it. It might be cheapest to just hire someone that does nothing but take the required measurements three times a day.

The requirement is 3 times.

The test would require perhaps 30 seconds.

As suggested seems rather simple.

Hire a person, seek out a community minded volunteer, or ask perhaps a maintenance provider for the property to add this to their assigned tasks.

Somehow, someway it gets done on properties with pools.

Our full-time engineer tests ours daily as now required in CA (can't find the statute). But it could be a volunteer or a custodian if you have one on the premises daily.

Thanks for the comments. We are in a small community where residents are unlikely to volunteer to do this on a regular basis. We have no hired staff members (only an off-site management co.) and the pool is lifeguard-exempt. The county health department does, indeed, require 3x a day monitoring and will not accept electronic monitoring. They consider ours to be a commercial pool even though it is lightly used. A human must do the work. Yes, it is expensive, but we have no choice. We rely on a company to do this instead of, say, college or high school students, because the company guarantees that someone will always show up and will record the three daily readings in a log book. A student might call in sick and then a monitoring session might be missed. The county does surprise inspections and if they see any missed readings in the log book, the pool can be shut down immediately. The only plus is that because the water is monitored three times a day, the company also inspects the pool three times a day and cleans it as required. We have a very clean, very closely-watched pool that, for a good part of the day, has no swimmers.

For some of us who have headed HOA pool committees here on Long Island, it can be fun.

Definition of 'Swimming Pool':

A hole in the ground which makes money disappear