Plans for $18M YMCA Move Forward

EVANSVILLE — YMCA officials are making rounds at the Civic Center this week presenting plans for their new Downtown facility to the City-County Site Review Committee Monday and Evansville Redevelopment Commission Tuesday.

Bids related to the construction are due Wednesday. YMCA officials will study the bids and compare them to the project's $18 million budget.

"We'll be reviewing those bids, seeing where we're at and determining what steps we need to take to move forward," said Rodney Lax, with lead contractor Skanska after Monday's Site Review hearing. "If things are in line, we'll move forward pretty quickly. If we need to make adjustments, it might take a week or two to fine-tune to stay in the budget we've put together."

The two-floor YMCA building is pegged for Court Street, between Fifth and Sixth streets, across from the current YMCA. It will have all the amenities the current one has -gymnasium, three-lane indoor track around the gym, workout room, locker rooms, programming space and executive offices. YMCA officials told the Courier & Press in March that previous plans to renovate the existing Downtown facility were thrown out. Building anew made more sense, those officials said.

The renovation project was complicated by the existing building's age. Future use of the current building and lot are not determined.

"We ultimately concluded that the vision we had for the current facility was not as viable as we once thought it was, from the standpoint of the amount of renovation we were looking at doing and how you make it work, given the physical limitations of the property and the space," CEO Derrick Stewart said.

Officials have said they want to break ground by summer.

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