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Sink or swim. That's not a question. Those are the only options we need to be discussing as we wade into the deep end of another civic argument that seems to define us.

We're always having these spats, aren't we? And they always seem to have something to do with sports — ballparks and coliseum issues, golf courses and high school athletics, concrete rivers and city council meetings. Yes, politics is our favorite sport in Guilford County.

The latest bickering — and, of course, it involves the newly elected City Council members who ran on the promise to end bickering — involves the proposed aquatics center agreed on by voters last year. The agreement was for a $12 million regional competitive swimming and diving center, which was only about two-thirds of what we now think it will cost, and thus the battle lines were drawn and here we are.

This afternoon the Council will return from a weekend retreat and basically re-examine the whole thing.

The issues splashing about are old issues really. Do we really need another swimming pool? Didn't we vote on it last year and say yes? How do we pay for the overruns? And just what in the world does a regional competitive aquatics center do?

OK, there are other issues such as taxes and blame and suspicion and skullduggery, but that's just business as usual in Greensboro. The only real issue here is: Are we going to do this? And if we do, are we going to do it right, or are we going to do it half-baked?

There was a time in this city when we did things right, and we didn't worry about all the other stuff. We just sort of made decisions based on the greater good and moved on, knowing darn well it might not work and it might cost a lot of money and it might not even be what we planned on to start with. But we did it anyway.

It was a can-do approach to politics and sports, which were always one and the same. We built the biggest coliseum in the Southeast, expanded it and made it bigger, then expanded it and made bigger again. And we knew it would lose money, and we did it anyway because it made us look good and it kept us from being bored all year long.

It had nothing to do with keeping up with Charlotte or Raleigh or Chattanooga or Rome. We did it because we didn't want to be a sleepy mill town that closed up and went away when the mills shut down. We didn't want to be a tobacco town without tobacco or a banking town without a bank. We wanted to be a sports and entertainment town.

And so that's what we became. We wanted Elvis to come here, and he did. We didn't want to be like Winston-Salem or Fayetteville or Gastonia or Asheville. We wanted to be different and distinct.

So we built a coliseum. We brought the Final Four here. The Atlantic Coast Conference was born here. NASCAR was born here. The Bassmaster Classic came here, three times. We're a PGA town and a soccer hotbed. We have the best minor-league baseball park in America.

And now, we're talking about building one of the best competitive swimming and diving centers in the country right out there on High Point Road, right in the middle of all that blight we've been talking about removing for all these years without doing anything about it. We're talking about competing with existing centers in Charlotte and Cary and Huntersville, not building one to match. We're talking about building one bigger and better.

Or at least we were. Now we're arguing again, and the Council's talking about paring it back or maybe throwing the whole thing back to the voters. There's talk of using hotel sales tax revenue to make up the difference between the $12 million agreed on and the $18 million we think it will really cost. Jim Melvin and the Bryan Foundation are not wading into this one. This is about Council politics and a legitimate vote. This is about cost overruns and what to do about them.

There's talk of doing away with the proposed diving well and just building another concrete pond. There's talk of getting a corporate sponsor, something this city has never done and hopefully never will.

None of these are really good ideas, and the best thing the Council can do today is listen to what the vocal swimming community has to say, argue it out among themselves and make a decision. That's what we elected them to do. We don't want this thing watered down. We don't want some corporation taking credit for it. We don't want it sent back to the voters.

The potential is for this to be a good thing for Greensboro and Guilford County. Say what you will about the vocal swimming community, but it's loud and it's real. There are a lot of people in this city, this county, this state and this nation who would come to this thing. This isn't a political beach ball. This isn't about Council members lining their pockets or pandering to their special-interest constituencies.

This is about swimming and diving and Greensboro. We either do this right or we don't do this at all.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com