BATAVIA — There’s a little more than a year and a half to go until the $33.5 million Healthy Living Campus in downtown Batavia is complete, GLOW YMCA CEO Rob Walker said recently.
“We have started our site work. The foundations are getting poured as we speak. Construction is underway. It’s going to take about 20 months to complete,” Walker said. “The completion date is expected to be late spring of 2024. The earthwork is complete. After that, it’s essentially getting the steel going up, when we start seeing the building come up. It will take about four to six weeks for the … construction pad to be ready for the building.
Walker said the amount raised for the project so far is $16.7 million.
“We expect to raise another million through grants and generous supporters from the community and open up this beautiful partnership with the hospital,” he said. “The community’s been amazingly supportive. Obviously, construction costs have gone up significantly, but we’ve adjusted to be able to raise more money than we expected to. We continually need to pursue more funds.”
The campus is a partnership with United Memorial Medical Center, On the hospital side, the campus will include 22 exam rooms and two medical procedure rooms. UMMC providers will use that space to offer primary care and telemedicine appointments, behavioral health and crisis intervention support, cancer prevention outreach, chronic illness and community education services. There will also be a drop-in child care center where families can safely leave their children while at those appointments. On the YMCA side, it will include a new indoor pool, group exercise studios, wellness center with the latest exercise equipment and indoor walking/running track, teaching kitchen and adventure room play area for children. The campus will also feature an innovative intergenerational room, where seniors, teens and families can use the space for different activities every day. And it will have classrooms that during the school year will run Pre-K and before- and after-school care programs, and camps in the summer.
“We’re not going to disrupt (current) operations. We’re going to have the new Y open, move everything over to the new Y, our programs and services, then the old Y will come down and that will be a park-like space,” he said. “It’s a mixed space. It’ll be a park and parking. There won’t be cars parked up against Main Street. This will be green space — trees, benches, proper lighting, green space — and the parking will be behind that.”
Walker said the Y is confident in the plan it has moving ahead.
“The partnership with the hospital has lifted up a lot of opportunities,” he said.
The YMCA’s portion of the cost has gone from $18 million to $23 million in the last two years. The hospital’s part of the cost is at about $10.5 million.
“The investment in the community’s $33,5 million. The benefit for downtown, and the jobs, the economic impact is over $60 million over 10 years,” he said. “Most importantly, we are very proud of the volunteers that have helped us and that we’re going to make a tremendous, long-term impact in downtown Batavia, to improve the quality of life for all our residents.”
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