A group of Polk County residents wants to reopen and repair a public pool, but city leaders say it's not in the budget.

Janet Smith, who lives in the Oakland community in Haines City, said she’s attended meetings asking city leaders to bring the pool up to code and open it up again.

“I refuse to sit here, and I’m looking for the city officials find some grants," Smith said. "There’s money that can be used, because this is a low-income area and I know that things can be done if somebody want it done."

But city leaders say it’s not that simple. The pool’s attendance was down before it closed a couple of years ago and city officials don’t have the money to reopen it now.

“The city only has a limited amount of funds that they can do stuff with," Haines City Public Safety Director Rick Sloan said. "And right now, the priority is to keep everything else that we have for the citizens going, and that’s just not one of them. It’s a policy decision that has to be made by the commission."

Smith said for more than 20 of those years her family and neighbors played and learned to swim in the Oakland Pool at the Dolphus Howard Complex. But she said a lack of maintenance has left the pool empty and surrounded by a locked gate.

“They let it get run down," she said. "They did nothing to it. Spent no money on it. I’d say for maybe 10 or 12 years they did nothing for that pool, nothing. If you don’t do something for your house, I don’t care how much you pay for it, it’ll go down. One or two of the commissioners, they just feel like Haines City, Oakland, don’t need it. To me ask them what they’re trying to do. Looks like they’re trying to bring segregation back here in our community. They’re not being fair.”

Sloan said it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the budget.

“With the economy the way that it is, the city just hasn’t had the money to do anything, so it’s been one of those things that every year we go through this process that there’s no money to do it with,” Sloan said. “At some point, there’s going to be a decision made. Either we’re going to do something with it or not."

That decision could take months. But Smith said she won’t stop until kids in this neighborhood are swimming in that pool again.

City leaders say there is another public pool visitors can go to while they sort out what to do with the Oakland Pool.