COVINGTON, LA., May 14, 2026 — POOLCORP, the world’s largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool and outdoor living products, recently announced the appointment of John Watwood as President and Chief Executive Officer.

Watwood joined the company in January 2026 as Executive Vice President and has quickly made an impact after spending much of his time in POOLCORP sales centers, meeting with customers, engaging with suppliers, and aligning closely with teams across the business. With extensive leadership experience in industrial and specialty distribution, Watwood brings a deep understanding of how to build high-performing teams, strengthen customer connections, and create long-term value in the industry.

Prior to joining POOLCORP, Watwood served as Senior Vice President of Sales and Operations at Motion Industries, a leading distributor of industrial parts and value-added solutions and a subsidiary of Genuine Parts Company. During his career, he has led large-scale sales and operations organizations focused on customer growth, supply chain excellence, and market expansion.

“John has gained the trust of our employees, customers, and suppliers in a very short period of time,” said Kenny St. Romain, Senior Vice President at POOLCORP. “He understands distribution at its core, but more importantly, he understands the value of relationships and the local support that our customers need. Our field teams have seen firsthand his commitment to listening, supporting our customers, and helping us continue to evolve our already successful service model. There’s real excitement across the organization about where we’re headed under John’s leadership.”

Watwood’s appointment marks the next chapter for POOLCORP as the company continues to invest in customer-focused solutions, sales and service excellence, operational capabilities, and technology-enabled experiences designed to help industry professionals grow and operate more efficiently.

About Pool Corporation

POOLCORP is the world’s largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool and related outdoor living products. The Company operates approximately 455 sales centers in North America, Europe, and Australia, through which it distributes more than 200,000 products to roughly 125,000 wholesale customers, including pool builders, retail stores, and service professionals. For more information, please visit www.poolcorp.com.

There are pool projects, and then there are projects that stop being about pools altogether.

The resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become one of the most politically charged aquatic construction stories in recent memory, dragging a relatively unknown contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, directly into the center of a national media firestorm. What might otherwise have been viewed as a complex waterproofing and restoration project is now being debated across cable news, social media, mainstream newspapers, and Google Reviews by people who have never hired the company, worked with the company, or, in many cases, likely even heard of the company before last week.

As the controversy intensified following reporting by The New York Times and other national media outlets, Atlantic Industrial Coatings’ Google Business profile was inundated with one-star reviews from non-customers condemning the company over the project, the politics surrounding it, and the reported ballooning cost of the renovation itself.

Some reviewers accused the company of “destroying” a national monument. Others referenced the project’s no-bid contract status, allegations of favoritism, and ties between the contractor and President Donald Trump. Several reviews contained no written explanation whatsoever, simply dropping the company’s rating lower with anonymous one-star hits.

For contractors in the pool and aquatic construction industry, the situation raises a difficult question:

What happens when taking on a nationally visible project turns your business into collateral damage in a political war you never intended to participate in?

Public Outrage vs Legitimate Reviews

Review bombing is hardly new. Restaurants, hotels, brands, entertainers, and public figures have all experienced it at one time or another. But the reflecting pool controversy highlights how vulnerable contractors can be when political outrage spills into business platforms that were originally intended to measure customer satisfaction.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings currently sits with a devastatingly low Google rating following a flood of politically motivated reviews. Many of the posts appear to come from individuals who were never customers and never interacted with the company in any traditional business capacity.

That distinction is important.

Google reviews were originally designed to help consumers evaluate legitimate customer experiences. Did the contractor show up? Was the workmanship good? Did the company honor its warranty? Was communication professional? Those are the kinds of things reviews are supposed to reflect.

Instead, Atlantic Industrial Coatings is being judged by people reacting to headlines, politics, presidential associations, and media narratives surrounding the reflecting pool restoration.

To those in the trade reading this, that may feel deeply unfair.

A company can spend years building its reputation one project at a time only to watch its online presence get torched in a matter of days because of a politically radioactive contract.

At the same time, there is another side to this discussion that cannot simply be dismissed.

Critics Are Not Inventing the Controversy

To be clear, the backlash here did not emerge out of thin air.

The core issue driving public outrage is not merely the coating color or aesthetic concerns surrounding the reflecting pool. The controversy centers on allegations reported by major national media outlets that a renovation originally discussed publicly as a roughly $1.8 million repair project reportedly ballooned into $13.1 million without a competitive bidding process.

That scrutiny intensified even further after preservation groups filed suit attempting to stop the project altogether, arguing the Trump administration bypassed historic review procedures and oversight protections surrounding one of Washington’s most iconic landmarks.

Critics argue that a taxpayer-funded restoration project tied to the Lincoln Memorial deserves intense public scrutiny, especially if normal procurement channels and preservation reviews were circumvented.

Those are legitimate public-interest questions.

It’s also true that Atlantic Industrial Coatings had never previously held a federal contract before being awarded the reflecting pool project, further fueling criticism surrounding the administration’s selection of the company. At the same time, President Trump publicly described the contractor as “a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools” who had worked on projects connected to his properties.

Industry experts have also raised legitimate technical concerns about the renovation itself. Tim Auerhahn, chairman of The Aquatic Council, told The New York Times that the reflecting pool’s longstanding algae and filtration issues would not simply disappear because the basin was coated blue, stating plainly, “Painting is not going to solve that problem.”

It is not unreasonable for journalists, watchdog groups, preservation advocates, or even members of the pool industry itself to question how a federal project increased in scope and cost so dramatically, or whether the work being performed fully addresses the reflecting pool’s underlying structural and mechanical problems.

The problem is that public scrutiny surrounding a project can quickly become public punishment of the contractor itself.

And those are not necessarily the same thing.

Contractors Rarely Control the Politics Around a Job

One of the realities of working in construction, especially at the commercial or municipal level, is that contractors often inherit political baggage they did not create.

A contractor may bid or accept work based on technical specifications, project scope, deadlines, and compensation. They are not necessarily the architects of procurement policy, government oversight, or political messaging surrounding the project.

If the reports are accurate that Atlantic Industrial Coatings was brought in under accelerated timelines for a nationally scrutinized restoration effort, they may simply have been the company willing and capable of executing the work under extraordinary pressure.

That distinction is important because the online reaction increasingly treats the contractor as though they were personally responsible for every political decision tied to the project.

For contractors watching this unfold, the message is unsettling.

Take on a politically sensitive project and your business may become permanently associated with national controversy whether you intended that or not.

“Trump’s Pool Guy” and the Optics Problem

The optics surrounding the project became even more combustible once national reporting began characterizing Atlantic Industrial Coatings as connected to Trump properties and previous work involving the president’s golf clubs.

Fair or unfair, that framing changed the narrative instantly.

The company was no longer simply a contractor restoring a reflecting basin. It became, in the public imagination, “Trump’s pool contractor.” In today’s hyper-polarized climate, that label alone was enough to trigger backlash regardless of the technical merits of the work itself.

For some people, the project immediately became symbolic of broader grievances involving politics, government spending, favoritism, and executive power.

Once that happened, Atlantic Industrial Coatings was no longer operating inside the normal rules of reputation management.

They became a proxy target.

Is Google Responsible for Fixing This?

That question is becoming increasingly difficult for platforms to ignore.

Google’s policies prohibit reviews from people who did not have a legitimate experience with a business, and many of the reviews targeting Atlantic Industrial Coatings appear to fall squarely into that category. Several are openly political, some contain no actual review content, and others seem tied entirely to reactions from national news coverage rather than firsthand customer experiences.

At the same time, the situation is more nuanced than a traditional fake review campaign.

Critics would argue the company accepted a highly visible public contract tied to taxpayer money, historic preservation concerns, and a politically charged administration. Supporters counter that Google Reviews were never intended to become a public referendum on federal politics or presidential decision-making.

That’s really the issue.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings is not being judged primarily on workmanship, communication, or customer satisfaction. The company is being judged on a national controversy surrounding a project most reviewers have no direct connection to.

For contractors, that’s a troubling precedent.

Because once online review systems become vehicles for political outrage rather than legitimate customer feedback, any company attached to a controversial public project can find its reputation under attack regardless of the quality of its work — suddenly becoming one headline away from being the next target.

Watch this article as a video:

Featured Photo Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. | Alamy

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been a defining feature of the National Mall for more than a century, stretching between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and serving as the backdrop for historic gatherings, cultural moments, and even a few unforgettable Hollywood scenes. But like any large-scale water feature that’s been in service for decades, it has also required ongoing maintenance, repairs, and periodic overhauls.

Now, President Donald Trump says the iconic pool is getting a new kind of upgrade—one that reflects a more practical, contractor-driven approach to fixing what he described as long-standing issues with the structure.

Speaking about the project, Trump characterized the Reflecting Pool as a visually important but aging asset. Built in the early 1920s with a granite bottom, the pool has faced challenges related to surface wear, leakage, and water quality over time. In his remarks, Trump pointed out that the original materials were not ideally suited for long-term submersion, noting that the bottom “never looked great” given the conditions it has been exposed to over the past century.

“Right now, it’s got no water in it because it was in terrible shape,” Trump later added in a video shared on his Truth Social account. “It was filthy dirty and it leaked like a sieve for many years.”

Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Renovation, A Shift in Strategy: Resurface Instead of Rebuild

Where the story becomes particularly relevant to pool professionals is in how the project is being approached. According to Trump, earlier plans called for a full-scale reconstruction—removing and replacing the granite bottom entirely. That proposal, he said, carried a price tag of $301 million and a timeline of three-and-a-half years.

Instead, the current plan pivots toward something far more familiar in the pool industry: resurfacing.

Rather than demolishing the existing structure, crews are cleaning and preparing the original stone, repairing joints, and applying a new, modern coating over the top. Trump described the material as an “industrial-grade” pool surface designed to improve durability, reduce leakage, and create a cleaner, more consistent finish.

The difference in scope is significant. Reports place the revised cost in the range of $1.5 million to $2 million, with a timeline measured in weeks instead of years. Project planners aim to have the renovation complete before July 4, 2026, the date of the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States.

This new alternative approach mirrors what many professionals in the pool construction trade already understand—when the shell is structurally viable, resurfacing can extend the life of a water feature dramatically without the cost and disruption of a full teardown.

Thinking Like a Pool Builder

Trump framed the decision in terms that will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time renovating pools. Drawing on his background in development, he described working with a wide range of contractors over the years and emphasized the importance of selecting the right one for the job.

“I’ve probably built more than a hundred swimming pools,” Trump said, adding—tongue in cheek—that while some builders delivered strong results, others did not, “but we took care of them.”

That experience, he suggested, informed the decision to bring in a contractor he had worked with on previous projects—someone he trusted to evaluate the Reflecting Pool not as a monument, but as a large-scale aquatic structure. In his telling, the concept was simple: clean the surface, prep it properly, and apply a modern coating system that performs better over time.

Work is already underway at the site. According to Trump, crews have begun preparing the existing surface using trucks and heavy equipment to scrape and clean the aging interior in advance of the new coating. Once the prep work is complete, the new material will be applied using specialized trucks designed to spread the coating evenly across the pool floor—a process he said would take approximately three days from start to finish.

The scale, of course, is anything but simple. At more than 2,030 feet long and roughly 167 feet wide, the Reflecting Pool is unlike anything most pool contractors will ever work on. But the underlying philosophy—preserve what works, fix what doesn’t, and avoid unnecessary demolition—is a familiar one.

A New Look: “American Flag Blue”

The visual change may be the most noticeable outcome of the project. Instead of the muted tones created by aging stone, the resurfaced pool will feature a deep blue finish.

Trump said he initially considered a brighter, more tropical look, but ultimately settled on what he described as “American flag blue,” a color choice intended to feel more appropriate for the setting.

The coating itself is designed to provide a smoother, more uniform surface while improving water retention and reducing some of the maintenance issues associated with the existing stone bottom. Trump also noted that modern cleaning technology—including robotic systems—would be used to help maintain the pool, drawing a parallel to residential pool care but at a much larger scale.

Not Everyone Is Sold on the Plan

Not everyone is in love with the remodeling plans. Preservationists and design experts argue that the Reflecting Pool is more than a functional body of water—it’s a carefully designed historic landscape. Their concern is that applying a bright blue, pool-style coating could change the visual character of the site, moving away from the subdued, mirror-like surface originally intended to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. From that perspective, the issue isn’t whether the pool needs maintenance, but how much its appearance should change in the process.

At the same time, others view the plan as a practical solution to long-standing maintenance challenges that have affected the pool for years. Still, critics have also raised questions about the process itself. Projects involving nationally significant landmarks typically undergo extensive review and public input, and some argue that a faster, contractor-driven approach may bypass those steps. The debate ultimately comes down to a familiar question in preservation work: where to draw the line between restoration and modernization.

A Landmark That’s Always Needed Work

While the current renovation has drawn attention, the Reflecting Pool is no stranger to major maintenance efforts. Over the decades, it has dealt with structural settling, water leakage, algae growth, and ongoing cleaning challenges. A major reconstruction completed in 2012 addressed many of these issues, including improvements to water circulation and infrastructure.

Like any large, shallow body of water exposed to the elements and heavy foot traffic, the Reflecting Pool requires continuous upkeep. From a pool industry perspective, it faces the same core challenges as any other system—just on a much larger and more visible scale.

Fast Facts: Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

• Completed in the early 1920s and designed by Henry Bacon
• Stretches over 2,030 feet long and approximately 167 feet wide
• Depth is 18 inches on the sides, 30 inches deep in the center
• Holds 6,750,000 gallons of water in a shallow basin
• Located between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument
• Has hosted historic gatherings and remains one of the most photographed sites in Washington, D.C.
• The Reflecting Pool was losing an average of 500,000 gallons of water each week due to leaks and evaporation at one point.
• Underwent a major $34 million renovation in 2012 to fix many issues
• Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech there in 1963.
• Featured in pop culture, including the iconic scene in Forrest Gump
• There are no fish in the reflecting pool, but ducks frequently use it as an aquatic oasis
• Swimming in or even entering the reflecting pool is strictly prohibited. Sorry, Jenny!
• The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is drained and cleaned annually

A Practical Fix for a Symbolic Space

At its core, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation highlights a tension that exists in many large-scale projects: balancing historical preservation with practical maintenance. Whether the new finish and this latest fix ultimately enhances or detracts from the Reflecting Pool’s historic character will likely be debated long after the work is complete. What’s less controversial is the outcome that everyone involved in the project is aiming for: a cleaner, more durable water feature that continues to serve as a gathering place for Americans and visitors to our nation’s capital for generations to come.