Like you said, they got to digging and realized, "well, this is going to cost a ton of money because we HAVE to make these Code updates"

Part of the issue was that Samuelson was in hot water (I guess as much as you can get at BYU) because of how much he spent on his science building (I believe he went over by about 15 million... I'd have to find my notes though). So he also didn't want to go to the BoT and say "Hey we want to now spend 25 million to expand the pool!" The decision to build the pool as is was them trying to 'save' money based off previous decisions that had been made by leadership.