"Look at the fly space we'd have. Look at the wings," says Tucker, artistic director for the Bountiful Performing Arts Center (BPAC).

The indoor Bountiful swimming pool - drained a decade ago - is an uncanny fit for a theater, say Tucker and BPAC President Phillip Wright.

"It just has this incredible feel. It looks like a theater," Tucker says.

Unfortunately for BPAC, there are complications in the group's bid to persuade Bountiful's City Council to turn the pool just east of City Hall into a performing arts center.

Bountiful's Historical Commission, a city committee, also has submitted a proposal to turn the pool into a museum, and a private developer has offered to buy it and turn it into offices.

Now, all three proposals could be made moot by a seismic study that found serious corrosion in the metal embedded in the building's concrete, says City Councilman Tom Tolman.

Tolman, who is on the Historical Commission, says inspectors found that three decades of exposure to pool chemicals took a toll.

"It just doesn't make sense to do anything with that building," he said.

The cost of making it safe would approach $1 million, according to the seismic study completed last week, says Tolman, who believes the building is worth only about $250,000.

It's worth much more than that, however, to BPAC, which has been staging live theater for more than 30 years in this southern Davis County city of 42,000 people.

To build a theater of the same size from scratch would cost about $7 million, Wright says.

"The fact it might cost $1 million should not be a deal killer," he adds. "It just might mean we need to work harder."

His group already had expected it would cost $1 million to remodel the pool building into a theater, with the stage - and trap door - going over the deep end and 260 to 280 seats in the shallow end that branches off both sides of the deep.

On Tuesday, BPAC will propose to the City Council that the group raise half the money to repair and remodel the building (it already has raised $100,000) and the council match it with the other half.

"If they vote against this, they are voting against community theater in Bountiful," Wright says. "If they say no, we're gone. That would be a travesty."

BPAC, he says, would have to fold because it no longer has the space to perform.

The city's fire marshal last summer ordered the group to reduce the number of people allowed in its black-box theater in the basement of the Bountiful/Davis Arts Center for safety concerns.

Now able to seat only 40, the theater no longer can afford to pay for play-production rights, he says.

Moreover, if the city sells and demolishes the pool, BPAC would lose the space where it now stores props, sets and costumes.

Artificial Christmas trees fill the men's shower and racks of costumes clog the women's changing room for the pool, which closed in 1996.

BPAC probably has 10 times the props and costumes it had in the years before the city allowed the group to use the pool for storage.

Aric Jensen, Bountiful's city planner, says it would make more sense, from a planning standpoint, for the city to put a museum and performing arts center in the historic downtown district, just a block to the north of the city complex.

They could act as people magnets to help revive downtown, he says.

Besides, the location of the old pool, on a corner of a school athletic field and across the lightly used 100 East from City Hall, is not good for a theater or a museum, Jensen says.

"I don't like the idea of putting more traffic, especially night traffic, on 100 East," he says.

Jensen says he will recommend selling the old pool property and putting the revenue toward buying land for community uses.

Tolman, who previously wanted to turn the pool into a museum, now says he will urge his council colleagues to demolish the old pool and sell the land for housing.

While Wright would love to see the city build a cultural arts center in the historic downtown district, as Jensen suggests, he sees little interest from the council to do so.

For now, transforming the old pool is the best choice for keeping community theater alive, he says.

"It's not just a group of goofy thespians who get together to recite lines. This is a dedicated group of people who appreciate the arts."

kmoulton@sltrib.com