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For seventy-six summers, the Courtenay and District Memorial Outdoor Pool is one of the places the Comox Valley learned to swim. It is also sinking into a floodplain.
By late August, the lineup at the deep end is three deep with teenagers. The Comox Valley Blue Devils, one of the oldest swim clubs in the province, run lengths in the marked lanes while parents juggle towels and goggles. Opened in 1949, the facility sits on old river deposits inside the 30-metre riparian zone of the Courtenay River, just below where the Tsolum and Puntledge meet. (The adjacent wading pool, added in 1959, was permanently closed in 2024 due to water loss.)
In November 2025, a consultant’s report gave the City of Courtenay three ways forward with three price tags: repair it for about $5.2 million, renovate it for roughly $14 million, or replace it for $32.5 million. In July 2026, council confirmed the replacement.
While the $32.5 million price tag captured headlines, the number that actually impacts property owners is much smaller, buried on the City’s engagement page: an estimated tax increase of $44 to $119 per year for the average home.
First, the scale. The City is not writing a $32.5-million cheque this year. Like most municipalities, it borrows for long-lived infrastructure and repays over decades, so the cost reaches your bill as an annual charge measured in tens of dollars, not thousands.
Understanding why that annual number is a range, and not a single figure, is most of what you need to know about how property taxes actually work in the Comox Valley.
Your assessment is not your tax bill
Start with the thing most people get backwards. The assessed value of your home, the figure BC Assessment mails you every January, does not set your taxes. It sets your share of them.
In 2026, a typical Courtenay single-family home was assessed at $752,000, up three per cent, according to BC Assessment. That sounds like a tax hike waiting to happen. It usually isn’t. As BC Assessment’s deputy assessor Matthew Butterfield put it, “how your assessment changes relative to the average change in your community is what may affect your property taxes.” If your home rose three per cent and the whole community rose three per cent, your share is unchanged, even though the notice went up.
The bill is built the other way around. The City decides how much it needs to raise, then divides that total across every property by assessed value. (Provincial school taxes and a few other levies are set differently, but the municipal portion works this way.) Raise the same total across higher values and the rate per dollar drops to compensate. That is why a rising market does not automatically mean rising taxes, and why an assessment can climb while the bill barely moves.
Why the same pool has two prices
Look again at that range. It has less to do with your house than with how many communities agree to share the cost.
The report is explicit. A new pool costs the average Courtenay home about $44 a year if the cost is shared across all the Comox Valley municipalities, and about $119 a year if Courtenay residents pay for it alone. Same pool, same average home, nearly triple the bill depending on one decision: whether Comox, Cumberland, and the rural electoral areas help carry a facility their families have been swimming in for decades.
That question, whether the region shares the cost or Courtenay pays alone, is still being decided. The pool is owned by the City of Courtenay but has always drawn swimmers from across the valley. In July 2026, rather than load the whole $32.5 million onto Courtenay’s own books, council endorsed pursuing a model in which the Comox Valley Regional District (CVRD) would borrow the capital cost while the City builds and operates the pool, pushing toward the shared end of the range, closer to $44 than $119. That still needs regional approvals, and whether the rest of the valley signs on is being worked out.
If you have ever squinted at your tax notice and wondered why it carries a municipal charge, a regional district charge, a school tax, and a hospital levy, this is the same machinery. Your single bill is a stack of separate governments, each raising its own money from the same assessed value. A pool can land on the regional line rather than the municipal one, so the cost of a Courtenay facility shows up on a Cumberland homeowner’s bill too, for a pool their family has to drive into town to swim in.
The other options split the same way. Repair runs $24 a year shared, or $65 Courtenay-only. Renovation, $27 to $74. Every figure is a range because that cost-sharing question is still open, not because homes differ in value.
The cheapest option is rarely the cheapest option
Repair is the cheapest thing you can do up front, and it also carries the lowest projected forty-year lifecycle cost within the consultant’s modelling: roughly $31 million all in, against about $81 million for the replacement, once four decades of operating and energy costs are counted. On paper, patch-and-pray wins.
On its own, though, that table can be misleading, because the options do not deliver the same thing. These are not three versions of the same pool. The repair figure assumes forty years of operating a facility the repair keeps alive for only about five. It fixes none of the underlying problems, the flood exposure, the accessibility gaps, the closed wading pool, and defers the big bill rather than paying it, with a major intervention still arriving after the study’s window closes. Renovation stretches the reprieve to a decade or two. Only full replacement, elevated two metres above the flood construction level and built to current accessibility and pool-safety code, is designed to last forty years or more. The cheapest line in the table does not buy the same facility, or the same service life, as the replacement.
That is the trade the community was asked to weigh, and it did. Across two rounds of engagement, more than 1,800 residents in 2024 and 619 in the 2025 survey, replacement was the clear preference, 62 per cent naming it first. Only four per cent wanted to close the pool.
The argument the survey didn’t settle
A clear majority preferred replacement. Since the vote, though, a steady current in local Facebook groups has kept a bigger question alive: whether to build a pool at all. Underneath the swimming, it is an argument about money.
The pitch: the Comox Valley is surrounded by open water it has historically made little use of, so why spend $32.5 million on a chlorinated tank when the river runs past the site? One resident sketched terraced steps into the water, docks, ladders, benches and towel hooks, the wild-swimming setup common in Sweden, Norway, and Finland, at a fraction of a pool’s cost and upkeep. “Why swim in chlorine when the river is right there?” Others pointed to the public ocean swimming deck coming to North Vancouver’s harbour as proof it can be done in Canada.
The pushback was just as strong. The Courtenay River is salmon-bearing, and residents who have watched the community spend years and millions restoring it, including the Kus-kus-sum project downstream, called building into the river a step backwards. Others made the plain point that a river is not a pool: no swim lessons, no lane swims, no aquafit in moving water, and shifting summer levels. And running under it all was the oldest line on any capital project. One resident dismissed the plan as $30 million for “a cesspool of chlorine”; another asked why a valley that has wrestled with a single roundabout and the new 6th Street bridge would take this on at all.
Relocation was a real possibility earlier, and the cheaper one. A 2023 regional study recommended moving outdoor swimming to the Comox Valley Aquatic Centre site, where a new pool sharing the existing building’s change rooms and plant was estimated at about $12 million. That figure is in 2022 dollars and a rougher estimate, so it is not a clean comparison to the $32.5 million, but the gap is real. It went nowhere for two telling reasons: residents wanted the pool central and beside the Lewis Centre, and the aquatic-centre plan would have meant handing it to the regional district to own and run. Council ultimately chose to retain the Lewis Park location while pursuing regional financing through the CVRD.
Council’s decision stands. But the thread captures what a $32.5-million line does in a small place: it makes an ordinary capital project a question of priorities, and a swimming pool a debate about what kind of community the Valley wants to be.
What it means if you own here, or want to
Ultimately, the gap between your assessment notice and your tax bill is where every major civic decision in the Valley eventually lands.
If you are buying, ask what is already committed. A new pool, a water treatment upgrade, a fire hall: the big capital projects approved this year are line items on the tax bill for years, and they follow the property, not the previous owner. If you are selling, a rising assessment is not the liability a nervous buyer assumes, and it helps to explain why.
Buyers often compare Courtenay, Comox, and Cumberland by their current tax rate. It is the easiest number to find and one of the least useful. The rate says nothing about what a town has committed to build, what it has quietly deferred, whether the water and sewer lines are nearing the age the pool just reached, or how much debt is already on the books. A town with a slightly lower rate and a decade of postponed infrastructure can be the more expensive place to own once the deferred bills come due. The pool is just the version of that math you can see, because it made the news.
And if you are just a homeowner reading the January assessment with a raised eyebrow, remember what it actually tells you. Not what you owe, only your share of what the Valley decides to build together.
Property tax mechanics and pool figures current to July 2026, drawn from the City of Courtenay’s November 2025 options report, the Engage Comox Valley project page, and BC Assessment’s 2026 release. Resident perspectives are paraphrased from public commentary in local community groups. Costing and tax estimates are order-of-magnitude and subject to change as the project advances. This post is general information, not tax or financial advice.