Y's plans good for city

06/24/2005

EDITORIAL
BRANTFORD EXPOSITOR

When the Brantford YM-YWCA announced in the fall it was selling its building on Queen Street and moving out, there was much apprehension about its future. An initial bid to buy Park Fitness in the north end failed and some prominent citizens – who came to be known informally as the “group of 10” – pushed to keep the Y downtown.

The Y cast about for a while, eventually settling on the 4.5-acre city-owned property occupied by the go-cart track on the Earl Haig Family Fun Park grounds on Market Street South. This week, the city voted to transfer the land to the Y, which plans to build a $12-million facility there.

In the meantime, the Y is renovating the dilapidated Work Wear building at Wellington and Clarence streets, to be called the Family Program Centre. It will move some of its programs to the building in September.

Said Brian Wood, vice-president of the Y’s board of directors: “Our future has been redefined in the most positive terms.”

Uncertainty often breeds more anxiety than concrete plans, even if those plans aren’t to everyone’s liking, so Wood’s assessment is sound. The Earl Haig location is close enough to the downtown for Laurier Brantford students to use. (Many York University students, for example, have to walk roughly the same distance across the giant campus to reach the fitness facility there.)

The Y will have to rebound from losing its swimming and court programs until the Earl Haig location opens but the organization has put the building blocks in place to do that. It has a new CEO in Nancy Romanenko and one of the “group of 10” – Superior Court Justice James Kent – has been named to the board of directors.

In the end, the Y will have two new facilities in the downtown area, new energy, new supporters – and the city will be better off.