Town officials are looking to bring a long-sought YMCA to Riverhead at the former state armory on Route 58 and are set to begin negotiations with YMCA of Long Island.
Council Member Bob Kern said yesterday the YMCA’s board of directors has “accepted Riverhead’s location,” referring to the armory transferred to the town by New York State in 2011.
The Town Board will approve a resolution next week endorsing the idea and authorizing negotiations between the Community Development Department and YMCA of Long Island.
There have been several attempts to bring a YMCA to Riverhead over the years; the most recent, in 2012, ended in YMCA of Long Island pulling out. Kern said the YMCA and the town in the past could “never agree on a location.”
Board members have in the past pointed at the armory as a potential location for the YMCA after plans to redevelop the property into a police/court complex fell apart.
“This has been going on for years trying to find the perfect location for the YMCA,” Council Member Tim Hubbard said during a work session discussion yesterday. “They’ve been raising money in funding to put this together. So to see it come to fruition would be awesome,” he said.
But the town’s plan faces some obstacles, both financial and legal.
The town would have to put together a committee to fundraise for the project, Kern said. He told the board that “hypothetically, it’s a $20 million project.” Kern said funds to bring a YMCA to Riverhead were raised years ago, but were used for other purposes after the organization was unable to find a suitable location.
“It will be an outside group of entrepreneurial people…that will put up 10, the YMCA will put up 10 million, and that’s what it costs and that includes all the remediation, etc, etc,” Kern said. “Everybody’s aware of it. They love the building because it’s built really well and it’s worth that remediation.”
Whether the town would lease the site to YMCA or sell the 5.72-acre property is also unknown. In an interview after the meeting, Kern did not say which avenue the town would pursue. The draft Town Board resolution authorizing the negotiations, which was distributed during the work session, does not specify.
“My focus has been to get their [YMCA] board support, because they had cold feet coming in here after what had happened in the past. Now they don’t. They know that we’re in full support,” Kern said in the interview. “And they’re excited about that, as excited as we are to have them.”
The building’s current condition is not publicly known. Although Kern said it is built well, town officials have said it has asbestos problems.
Last year, Hubbard said the building has many problems and would be expensive to renovate; he said it probably needs to be demolished.
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There is also a legal hurdle to developing the property into a YMCA. The state’s deed of the site to the town explicitly conditions the transfer on the town improving and maintaining it for “use by police department, justice court, public safety and recreational programs developed and operated by the Town of Riverhead Police Department.” It continues: “In the event that the premises are not used for such purposes, the title hereby conveyed shall revert to the People of the State of New York and the Attorney General may institute an action in Supreme Court for a judgment declaring a revesting of such title in the State.”
Town officials in the past, including during a work session in May 2022, have discussed seeking to have the deed restriction changed. Board members did not discuss it yesterday.
The site was deeded to the town by New York State in 2011 when the town was looking for a place to relocate its police and town court complex from its present location on Howell Avenue due to space limitations and safety concerns there. Plans prepared by architects and engineers hired by the board at a cost of $87,500 to renovate the armory site for use by the police department and justice court at an estimated cost of $13 million were rejected by the Town Board in 2014 as too expensive.
The board, after considering other options, including the construction of a new three-story Town Hall on Howell Avenue, opted last year to purchase the former Suffolk County National Bank campus on West Second Street for a new Town Hall from Peconic Bay Medical Center for $20 million. The board discussed plans to renovate the current Town Hall for use by the justice court and upgrade the current police/court building for continued use by the police department.
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Those plans left the town-owned former armory property without a purpose.
In a phone interview yesterday afternoon, YMCA of Long Island Marketing and Communications Director Mary-Beth Coursen confirmed the organization’s discussions with the town.
“We are working closely with the Town of Riverhead to bring a full facility YMCA to that community,” Coursen said.
YMCA President and CEO Anne Brigis is out of the country and was not available for an interview, Coursen said.
According to its website, YMCA of Long Island has seven locations around Nassau and Suffolk counties, including in East Hampton, Glen Cove, Patchogue, Huntington, Holtsville and Bay Shore.
A number of previous attempts to bring a YMCA to Riverhead have failed. Baiting Hollow resident Joe Van de Wetering, who died last year, worked for years to bring a “Peconic YMCA” to the town, spearheading a successful fundraising effort and pursuing potential locations of both privately and publicly owned land. In 2012, YMCA of Long Island, under Brigis’ leadership, pulled out of a plan devised by Van de Wetering and town officials to locate a facility at the Calverton Enterprise Park and opted to pursue a facility on the Riverhead Central School District’s campus instead. That project never materialized.
The Family Community Life Center, a housing and community center project led by the leaders of the First Baptist Church of Riverhead, announced in 2018 that it would partner with YMCA of Long Island to build its recreation center. The collaboration with YMCA was apparently scrapped, as the current plans of the Family Community Life Center do not include the YMCA.
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