In December 2007, on a 3-2 vote, City Council approved the ground lease for the Piedmont YMCA to construct its facility within McIntire Park. And that’s when the controversy began. The construction of the YMCA has been at the center of a heated debate over the possibility of losing the park’s softball fields.
“If you go to the public records and you check the City Council minutes and the ground lease agreement with the YMCA, you will discover that we never intended to be on the softball fields,” says Denny Blank, CEO of the Piedmont Family YMCA. “We got somehow tied up with that whole controversy.”
Blank and architect Todd Bullard went before the city’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR) last Tuesday night, to present the latest design for the facility.
“It’s all about transparency with us,” says Blank. “And because we are utilizing public space and parkland, we wanted to make sure that it is in accordance to what the city’s best wishes are.”
The new design currently features an aquatics center with two swimming pools —a competition pool and a more family-oriented, therapeutic pool—“with water slides and maybe some spray features,” says Bullard. The next major component in the 60,000-square-foot project, is a double gymnasium with two full-court basketball courts, a jogging track on the upper level, a fitness center with weight-training equipment, stationary bikes, multipurpose rooms and lockers. “The concept is for a two-story building,” says Bullard, but most of the square footage will be in the lower level, sunken into the hillside, thus giving the appearance of being a single story structure.
The schematics “look very promising,” said BAR Chairman Fred Wolf at the meeting. “I think it’s an exciting project … I personally feel like I would tend to support it,” he said. Bullard says he was pleased the BAR did not find major red flags with the design. “We didn’t hear anything that would cause us any alarm,” he says. “We are proceeding along.”
Most importantly, the current design does not encroach on the softball fields. “The YMCA is only going to disrupt the part of the park that has two seldom-used picnic shelters,” says Blank. “Actually, they will be dismantled and moved, so we are not even losing them. We are just moving them to another location in the park.”
The original cost of the facility was estimated at $15 million, as Kurt Krueger, chairman of the YMCA Board, told C-VILLE in November. Blank says the cost is now estimated between $11 million and $12 million. The initial cost, says Blank, was based on a much larger facility. “At the time, UVA was in negotiations with us to add a water component, which they no longer decided they need,” says Blank. “It has been inappropriately reported in the press the reason the Y is downsizing is because of the softball fields,” he says.
The Y will mostly be paid for by private donations, and just as Krueger told C-VILLE last year, the board has not yet raised all the money. “We are about $7.5 million from our goal, “ says Blank. “Quite frankly, this entire controversy over the softball fields put us in a situation where we actually had to step back and focus our attention on negating bad publicity.”
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