WASHINGTON ― Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) is calling on President Donald Trump to personally pay back taxpayers for the millions he spent revamping the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is now a cesspool of algae and chunks of blue sealant.“Americans have watched a national embarrassment unfold on the National Mall,” Hickenlooper says in a new letter to Trump, first obtained by HuffPost.“Under the guise of an ‘emergency,’ your Administration bypassed competitive bidding processes to rush a renovation of the iconic Reflecting Pool,” says the senator. “Today, the Reflecting Pool is a fluorescent green swamp of algae, and the expensive blue sealant is already peeling off the bottom in sheets.”“The bill for this fiasco should only belong to you, Mr. President,” he adds.A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Here’s a copy of Hickenlooper’s letter:The mess at the pool was entirely avoidable: Trump rushed to paint it “American flag blue” in time for a July 4th photo-op, and in the process, he bypassed laws and gave out no-bid contracts. The result is a combination of shoddy work, a missed deadline and more than $16 million in taxpayer money gone.The president has tried to blame the disaster on mysterious vandals, baselessly suggesting people came in the dead of night with knives to shred the blue sealant and dump algae into the water.“We have 100, and we have a, I think, 290, 300-foot slit right through it, probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind,” Trump said Monday to reporters at the White House. “We had people lifting up the basic, some of the bays. It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and re-fix it.”In his letter, Hickenlooper scoffed at the president’s claims.“This was not a result of vandalism,” said the senator, “but your administration’s incompetence.”