For two decades, the North Myrtle Beach Aquatic and Fitness Center has been a fixture of community life, serving more than 5,200 members with swim lessons, fitness classes, and youth programs [WMBF, 2025]. But buried inside the City’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget is a detail that deserves residents’ attention: the single largest slice of the center’s operating budget does not go toward the pool, the gym, or the people teaching classes. It goes toward administration.

Administration Tops Every Other Division

The Aquatic & Fitness Center (AFC) is divided into five budget units: Administration, Aquatics, Activities, Fitness, and Custodians. According to the proposed FY 2027 budget, total operating expenditures for the center come to $2,502,151 [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026]. Of that, the Administration division alone accounts for $953,019 — roughly 38 percent of everything the center spends [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026].

To put that in perspective, the actual Aquatics division, which covers lifeguards, swim instructors, and pool upkeep, is budgeted at just $460,359 [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026]. In other words, the city plans to spend more than twice as much running the center’s office as it does running the water programs the facility is named after. Administration also outspends Activities ($464,015), Fitness ($384,260), and Custodians ($240,498) combined in compensation weight relative to staffing [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026].

That imbalance becomes the natural starting point for a second question: if administration costs so much, where exactly is the money moving?

A Curious Shift Inside the Numbers

The budget itself records that Administration spending is actually dropping 10.1 percent next year, from $1,060,653 to $953,019 [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026]. On the surface, that looks like restraint. The detail underneath tells a more complicated story.

Nearly the entire reduction comes from a single line: Repairs and Maintenance, which falls from $137,200 to zero — a 100 percent cut [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026]. The Aquatics division shows the same pattern, with its repairs line dropping from $36,800 to nothing [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026]. At the same time, the Administration division’s compensation costs rise by $36,520, driven by wage increases, a 28.7 percent jump in retirement contributions, and a 155.9 percent spike in workers’ compensation [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026].

So the “savings” are not really savings in the everyday sense. The city is spending more on people while eliminating the budgeted money for fixing the building — even as it prepares to take on debt to make that building far larger.

The $15 Million-or-$18 Million Question

This is where the financial discrepancies sharpen. When the city publicly announced the AFC expansion in November 2025, officials repeatedly described it as a roughly $15 million, 31,000-square-foot project [WMBF, 2025; MyHorryNews, 2025]. The FY 2027 budget, however, authorizes an $18 million borrowing supported by Local Accommodations Tax revenues for that same expansion [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026].

That is a $3 million gap between what residents were told and what the budget now commits to borrow. The budget does not spell out, in the AFC pages, what accounts for the difference — whether it reflects design changes, cost inflation, contingency padding, or simply a more complete estimate. For taxpayers, the gap is worth a direct question to council.

The financing picture raises a further point. The center is projected to run a modest operating surplus of $201,849 next year, on $2,704,000 in revenue against $2,502,151 in expenditures [City of North Myrtle Beach, 2026]. But that surplus is dwarfed by the new debt, which will be repaid largely through tourist-driven accommodations taxes rather than membership fees.

Following the Pattern Across the Budget

The AFC is not the only place where projections invite scrutiny. Independent local coverage has flagged that the city’s Sports Complex is projected to generate $2,612,827 in revenue — more than double its FY 2026 figure — a forecast one outlet said “deserves close watching [MyrtleBeachSC, 2026]. When multiple recreation facilities show aggressive revenue assumptions alongside rising administrative compensation, residents have reason to ask how realistic the underlying math is.

What Residents Should Take Away

None of this proves wrongdoing. Zeroing out a repairs line may simply reflect a plan to fold maintenance into the capital expansion. The $18 million figure may be a refined estimate. But the pattern — administration consuming the largest share of the center’s budget, repair funding vanishing while salaries climb, and a borrowing figure that exceeds the publicly announced cost — is exactly the kind of thing worth raising before the budget is adopted. Public budget hearings are the venue for those questions, and the FY 2027 document gives Horry County residents the numbers they need to ask them.

Further Reading

• City of North Myrtle Beach, FY 2027 Proposed Budget (source document)
• MyHorryNews — AFC expansion announcement
• WMBF News — Recreation center expansion project
• MyrtleBeachSC — NMB tax increase and budget proposal
• City of North Myrtle Beach — Official AFC expansion release