Construction of YMCA expected to begin in spring

The Piedmont Family YMCA now hopes to begin construction on its McIntire Park center this coming spring, roughly a year after the nonprofit anticipated starting on the facility that remains controversial.

The City Council decided in December 2007 to lease the nonprofit 3 to 5 acres in McIntire Park worth between $1.7 million and $2.8 million.

With Charlottesville’s first Master Plan for McIntire Park’s western side having been adopted in spring 2008, YMCA board Chairman Kurt Krueger said the organization thought it would take a year to finalize its drawings, get them approved and have the facility’s groundbreaking.

“It took a lot longer than that,” Krueger said.

Krueger and YMCA CEO Denny Blank cite multiple reasons as to why that happened: difficult site topography, plan revisions and a sharp decline in donations.

The YMCA has been revising plans from its original vision of having a 75,000- to 80,000-square-foot center. Though plans could still be modified, the proposed facility is now slated to measure 61,000 square feet with opportunities for future expansion, should the nonprofit be able to raise more money through its capital campaign.

With the delay, construction of the city’s section of the Meadowcreek Parkway in McIntire Park’s eastern side is likely to overlap much more with the Y’s construction on the western side.

The September construction advertisement date for the city’s 0.6-mile parkway portion has been delayed slightly. In June, Jeanette Janiczek, the city’s urban construction initiative planner, said it would take a year to build the road through the park once the project was advertised and construction bids came back.

Both Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s portions of the parkway are scheduled to be completed in fall 2011.

“I always assumed they would be overlapping to a certain extent, so that doesn’t necessarily surprise me,” Mayor Dave Norris said. He said the western side of McIntire Park would still be useable even as the YMCA is being built.

“This isn’t like building a Wal-Mart, or a new road for that matter. This is a fairly contained construction project,” he said.

Once construction on the park’s new recreation facility begins, Blank said it would take 14 to 16 months to complete. Donations have been stagnating for months, Blank said, because of the bad economy and what he sees as controversies generated by local media.

The area organization’s funding for the new facility is approaching the $8 million mark, but is still quite shy of the $12 million it is trying to garner.

“That hasn’t had that much movement for the past eight to 10 months,” Blank said of the nonprofit’s fundraising. “We’re ready to ramp that up again starting in the fall.”

Blank said the $12 million target would probably not cover the entire cost of the building, so it is possible that the group will have to issue bonds.

The city government is also projecting to give $625,000 in fiscal 2011 and $500,000 in fiscal 2012 as part of the agreement for the YMCA to construct a competitive swimming pool. In addition to setting aside roughly $2 million, Albemarle County also plans to give $1.25 million in fiscal 2015 for that purpose.

Blank said that the nonprofit also pushed the groundbreaking date back to spring 2010 instead of possibly starting this coming winter so it could “preserve the integrity of the park.”

“We don’t want to make a lot of mess with excavation while the ground is wet and soppy,” he said.

The pushing back of the YMCA’s construction date is not deterring McIntire Park preservation activists such as Bob Fenwick, who is running as an independent for the City Council and railing against the new center and the Meadowcreek Parkway as a part of his campaign.

“We’ve got a long fight ahead of us on the YMCA,” Fenwick said. “I would like to see it delayed indefinitely, obviously.”