Cranston's Budlong Pool finally reopened this year after a years-long wait, but the project still has one more hurdle to clear: the city says it never received a pool cover.
The pool, which had been closed since 2020, officially reopened over the summer following repeated delays, according to turnto10.com. Vantage Builders of Waltham served as the general contractor on the project and completed its work before the pool opened. Cranston still lacks the custom-made cover meant for the 8,000-square-foot pool. City officials say they have not paid Vantage Builders for the cover and had secured financial holdbacks with the contractor to cover any incomplete work.
Seeking a Pool Cover
The city is now trying to procure the cover from alternate sources.
The cover itself carries a price tag of roughly $40,000 and typically takes six to eight weeks to fabricate once an order is placed, adding yet another waiting period to a project that has already tested the patience of Cranston residents.
A Project Years in the Making
Budlong Pool's reopening was originally targeted for 2024, then pushed to 2025, before ultimately landing in 2026, per the same turnto10.com account. Construction hit a significant snag in the spring of 2025 when crews uncovered an old drain pipe that wasn't documented in site plans, flooding the excavated construction site, according to wpri.com. That discovery threatened to push completion into late summer, and at the time, the full scope of remediation work — and its effect on the budget — had not yet been determined.
The project had originally been expected to wrap up by May 2025 before that timeline slipped to early July, WPRI reported. The architectural plans called for an 8,000-square-foot pool with four lap lanes, a design detailed in turnto10.com's earlier coverage of the city's contractor selection.
Cost Figures Have Shifted Along the Way
Pinning down exactly what Budlong Pool has cost the city has proven complicated. Cranston accepted an estimated $4.2 million bid from Vantage Builders in mid-2024 to demolish the old pool and build a new one, but by the time the pool reopened this year, city officials placed the total cost closer to $5.1 million — still under the city's $5.3 million budget, according to turnto10.com's opening-day report. The final price of the project has not yet been determined.
The project was funded in large part by more than $4.3 million in federal ARPA funds along with an additional $750,000 in HUD grant money, per the city's own accounting relayed in turnto10.com's reporting.
