“We are trying to build a new YMCA, and I hope everyone on council is on board … and I’m sure they are,” Bonfiglio said during the public comment portion of Monday’s City Council meeting. “The community needs to be on board.”

In May, John Barber and Tom Benson with the YMCA went before the Jamestown Local Development Corp. to request $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to help the local nonprofit build a new state-of-the-art facility on Harrison Street.

“We’ve submitted a proposal, and many of you have certainly seen that the YMCA has an endeavor to build up a new YMCA facility,” said Barber, vice president of operations for the Jamestown YMCA. “The reasons for that are pretty simple. If you’ve been to the YMCA, a short walk around the space will tell you pretty quickly the space has aged. In fact, you can walk and see the cornerstone and see that the building was built in 1929, so we’re approaching a 100-year-old building.”

Benson said the proposed 68,000-square-foot facility will cost $30 million to construct. He said the YMCA has about $4 million in committed funds from local and regional foundations. However, the project has faced a major roadblock with regard to state funding for the new YMCA facility.

Russ Bonfiglio, a member of the Jamestown Area YMCA Board of Directors, spoke Monday to members of the Jamestown City Council.

“We met with state officials two or three times talking about the project,” he told JLDC members in May. “They’re very familiar with Jamestown and were very involved in the Comedy Center project. They like the project very much, they want to be able to fund the project, but they said you have to come back when you have more of something in the bag to show us that there’s local commitment to the project.”

The City Council has allocated $1.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to help local nonprofits in Jamestown. Nine organizations, including the Jamestown YMCA, have submitted funding applications totalling $2.75 million.

JLDC members are expected to take up the applications for action in July. Tony Dolce, a member of the Jamestown Local Development Corp. and City Council president, said the board has some options to consider, including approving funds to some organizations and not others, or decreasing by an equal percentage how much each organization receives.

On Monday, Bonfiglio outlined the litany of programs and services provided by the local YMCA.

“We need this new Y, and I hope council and the community supports it,” he said. “If this doesn’t happen, I would say in less than five — I don’t want to give an exact figure, maybe two, three years — there probably will be no Y. Financially, we’re not going to be able to do it. So, we need it and we need community support.”

The YMCA purchased the plot of land on Harrison Street from the Chautauqua County Industrial Development Agency. The organization has long been located on East Fourth Street in downtown Jamestown.

Benson told JLDC members that the “clock is ticking” on the current YMCA facility. While Benson and Barber believe the building can be utilized by other organizations in the future, they indicated that the current building is not sustainable for its current usage.

“For the future of this community and all the other stuff we’re trying to do to bring young people back to this place, without a Y, especially a full-body Y, like what we’re talking about here, it just creates a big hurdle to that whole process,” Benson said. “Hopefully, we can get the commitment from the city to get the ball rolling and move this thing forward and to allow us to leverage to the next bunch of steps, because it’s crucial.”