What an 8-week pop-up splash pad taught a mid-size city about permanent feasibility
A composite case study of a temporary pilot splash pad operated for one summer at a downtown festival site, used to test demand and operating logistics before committing to a permanent capital project.
Summary
A mid-size capital city ran an 8-week pop-up splash pad pilot on a downtown festival square at $138,000 total cost, deliberately framed as a feasibility test before a permanent capital decision. The pilot logged roughly 41,000 visits, surfaced three operating issues that would have crippled a permanent build, and gave council the data to approve a $1.6M permanent pad at a different site. The pop-up model is uniquely valuable for cities uncertain whether splash-pad demand will support permanent infrastructure.
Key metrics
Background: a feasibility question without a feasibility answer
The city's parks department had been quietly debating splash-pad investment for roughly four years before the pop-up pilot. Two competing intuitions held the conversation in stalemate. Parks staff and family-advocacy organizations argued that the city's three aging wading pools represented a clear unmet demand and that any splash pad would draw heavily. Finance and downtown-business stakeholders argued that the city's short summer (roughly 90 productive operating days) and large lake-front public-beach inventory meant splash-pad demand might be structurally lower than in southern cities. Without a way to test the question short of a $1.5M+ permanent capital commitment, the conversation cycled through two budget cycles without resolution. A new parks director, hired in late 2023, proposed a pop-up pilot as a low-stakes feasibility test — a temporary pad would either generate compelling demand data to justify a permanent build or generate disappointing data to settle the question and redirect capital elsewhere.
Funding model: contingency dollars and a downtown BID partnership
The pilot's $138,000 total cost was deliberately scaled to fit within funding sources that did not require council approval. Roughly $84,000 came from parks-department contingency and unspent prior-year operating dollars (within the parks director's discretionary authority). Roughly $36,000 came from the downtown business improvement district (BID), which framed the pop-up as a downtown summer-programming asset analogous to the city's farmers' market and outdoor concert series. The remaining $18,000 came from a regional foundation focused on civic-engagement infrastructure, which funded the pilot's evaluation and reporting work specifically. The funding stack was important politically — by avoiding capital-budget appropriation, the pilot avoided pre-committing council to either approve or oppose a permanent build before the data came in.
Procurement: a rental-equipment splash-pad system
The pilot used a commercial rental splash-pad system from a vendor specializing in temporary aquatic installations for festivals and events. The system included a 1,800-square-foot mat-style pad with 12 portable ground-spray and bubbler features, a self-contained mechanical trailer with filtration and chlorination, two portable shade canopies, and ADA-compliant transfer benches. Total rental cost was $68,000 for the 8-week deployment, including delivery, installation, daily maintenance support, and de-installation. The remainder of the $138,000 covered water and sewer (the system was hooked to a downtown municipal hydrant for fill plus a sanitary-sewer connection for periodic drain-down), electricity (a temporary metered service drop), labor (two part-time pad attendants from the parks department's seasonal staff), evaluation and survey work, and a portable restroom rental on the festival square.
Site selection: festival square as a deliberate trade-off
The pilot site was the city's downtown Capitol Square festival site — a high-visibility location that ensured maximum data quality but was deliberately not the most likely permanent-pad site. Parks staff specifically wanted to avoid the political dynamic where the pop-up location pre-empted the permanent siting decision. The trade-off was that the pop-up's downtown location skewed visitor demographics toward office workers, downtown residents, and out-of-town festival visitors, and away from the neighborhood-resident demand that would dominate a permanent neighborhood pad. The evaluation framework explicitly accounted for this skew, and the survey instrument included questions about neighborhood of origin and likelihood-to-visit a hypothetical neighborhood-located pad. Parks staff treated the site mismatch as a feature of the design — it produced a conservative demand estimate, since the pop-up was sub-optimally located for the demographic that would drive permanent-pad demand.
Operating reality: three issues that mattered
The pilot surfaced three operating issues that would have been expensive surprises in a permanent build. First, evaporation rates on a downtown hardscape site were dramatically higher than design assumptions — the pad's recirculation reservoir needed full top-up roughly every 36 hours rather than the projected weekly cycle, increasing water-cost per visit by roughly 60%. Second, the festival-square site's existing storm-drainage infrastructure was insufficient for the pad's drain-down volume, requiring a temporary plumbed connection to a sanitary sewer (with associated permitting friction) rather than the planned storm discharge. Third, the pad's noise profile under late-afternoon downtown ambient conditions was substantially less audible than expected, but the bucket-dump cycle still drew complaints from a single nearby office tenant, surfacing a noise-isolation specification that would have been overlooked in a neighborhood site. The three issues collectively reshaped the permanent-pad design specification in ways that an opening-day surprise on a $1.6M permanent build would have been costly to address.
Attendance and demand validation
The pilot logged approximately 41,000 visits across 56 operating days, averaging roughly 730 visits per day. Weekend visits skewed higher (peaking at 1,400 on the hottest July weekend) and weekday visits were dominated by lunchtime office-worker stops with kids and after-school visits with older children. Survey data collected at exit indicated roughly 38% of visitors were downtown residents, 31% were neighborhood residents from elsewhere in the city, 18% were suburban visitors, and 13% were out-of-town festival or business visitors. Critically, 84% of in-city respondents indicated they would 'definitely' or 'probably' visit a hypothetical neighborhood-located permanent pad — a result that survived demographic weighting and gave parks staff the demand data needed to recommend a permanent build at a neighborhood site. The pilot also generated a mailing list of roughly 6,200 households who opted in for updates on the permanent-pad project, which became a community-engagement asset for the subsequent capital campaign.
Council decision: data-driven approval at a different site
The parks department published a 22-page evaluation report in October 2024, six weeks after the pilot ended, presenting attendance data, demographic analysis, operating-cost analysis, surfaced engineering issues, and three specific recommendations. The report recommended (1) approval of a $1.6M permanent pad at a neighborhood park site selected through a follow-on equity-and-access analysis, (2) explicit engineering specifications addressing the three operating issues surfaced during the pilot, and (3) a phased capital plan adding a second neighborhood pad two years after the first if the year-one attendance pattern matched pilot projections. Council approved the recommendation 14–6 in December 2024, with the dissenting votes split between fiscal conservatives uncomfortable with any new capital project and progressive members preferring to reallocate the capital toward affordable housing. Construction began in spring 2025 and the permanent pad opened in May 2026.
When pop-up makes sense — and when it doesn't
The pop-up pilot model is uniquely valuable for cities facing genuine feasibility uncertainty about splash-pad demand. The model is most useful when (1) there is meaningful political disagreement about whether demand exists, (2) the city has $100,000–$200,000 in flexible funding it can deploy without capital-budget appropriation, (3) at least one downtown or festival site can host a temporary installation, and (4) the city has the analytical capacity to evaluate demand data rigorously. The model is less useful when demand is already clearly established (most southern and Sun Belt cities), when funding sources are too rigid to support a sub-capital pilot, or when the city's political dynamic would treat any pilot as a de-facto permanent commitment. The most-common pitfall is allowing the pop-up site to become a political constituency for permanent placement at the same site — the Madison composite specifically pre-empted this by selecting a site no one expected to be permanent.
Lessons for the temporary-pad vendor industry
The pilot also produced lessons for the vendor side of the temporary-pad industry. Rental systems sized for festival-event use (typically 4–48 hour deployments) require modest upgrades to be reliable across an 8-week deployment — particularly around recirculation-pump duty cycles, mat-system seam wear, and chlorination-skid calibration drift. The pilot vendor reported using the Madison deployment as a product-development opportunity, and subsequently introduced a 'pilot-grade' system specification with extended-duration components. The pilot also surfaced a meaningful market opportunity in the gap between festival-event rental and full permanent installation — cities increasingly want a 4-to-12 week pilot capability, and the vendor industry is gradually building product offerings to match.
Voices from the project
“We were stuck for four years on a $1.5 million decision because no one could prove the demand. The pop-up cost us a hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars and gave us the answer in eight weeks.”
“The three engineering issues we hit on the pilot would have been three engineering surprises on opening day of a permanent pad. The pilot paid for itself just on the drain-down rework alone.”
“The mailing list of six thousand households we built during the pilot ran the entire community-engagement campaign for the permanent project. That's not in any spreadsheet, but it was the most valuable thing we got.”
Lessons learned
- Use a pop-up pilot when there is genuine political disagreement about whether splash-pad demand exists.
- Site the pilot deliberately away from the most-likely permanent location to avoid pre-empting the siting decision.
- Fund the pilot through contingency, BID, and foundation dollars rather than capital appropriation.
- Plan for a 56-day deployment to require pilot-grade vendor equipment, not festival-event rental specs.
- Build a permanent-pad mailing list during the pilot — it becomes a community-engagement asset for the capital campaign.
- Publish a formal evaluation report within 6–8 weeks of pilot end while attention is still high.
- Treat surfaced engineering surprises as the most-undervalued ROI of the pilot.
FAQ
How much does a pop-up splash pad pilot cost?
Representative range is $90,000–$180,000 total for a 6-to-10-week deployment with rental equipment, water and sewer, electricity, labor, and evaluation work. The Madison composite landed at $138,000 over 8 weeks, with rental equipment accounting for roughly half the cost.
Can a temporary splash pad be operated for an entire summer?
Yes — vendor systems originally designed for festival-event use (4–48 hour deployments) can be specified for extended-duration deployment with upgrades to recirculation pumps, mat-system seams, and chlorination skid components. Cities should specify pilot-grade systems explicitly rather than accept festival-event spec equipment.
Should the pop-up pilot be sited at the most likely permanent-pad location?
Generally no. Siting the pilot at the most-likely permanent location creates a political constituency for permanent placement at the same site, which can pre-empt a rigorous neighborhood-equity siting decision. Siting the pilot at a deliberately different (often downtown festival) location preserves the permanent-siting flexibility while still validating demand.
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