By Kevin Ostrowski
NORTH TONAWANDA — North Tonawanda’s seniors and teenagers have spent years in borrowed rooms. On Nov. 3, city voters agreed to change that, and to put their property tax bills behind it.
By a margin of 61% to 39%, voters approved borrowing up to $18 million to renovate and expand the city-owned Norman L. Keller Community Building on Wheatfield Street, near the city’s Little League fields, The Buffalo News reported. The plan would move the Senior Center and the youth center, known as The Rec, under one roof.
Mayor Austin Tylec said the project is expected to cost about $15.5 million, including engineering and other “soft” costs. The extra borrowing authority is meant to cover surprises.
“If it didn’t pass, we’d still most likely have three separate locations for the different city programs. And so luckily it did pass — pretty well, too,” Tylec told The Buffalo News. He added, “It showed that Republicans and Democrats, I would say, were in support of the facility.”
Why the city wants out of its leases
The Senior Center now sits on the first floor of the Carousel Park Apartments, at Oliver and Goundry streets across from Rainbow Rink. The complex was once a senior living center and is now an affordable housing community. Tylec said the city gets an average of 650 first responder calls a year at the complex and nearby, which raises safety concerns for Senior Center members and guests.
The lease is its own problem. Alex Domaradzki, the city’s director of youth, recreation and parks, said the city is on the hook for repairs to a building it doesn’t own, including the HVAC system and the roof.
“All the major things that you wouldn’t expect a tenant to be responsible for. But that was what was signed years ago,” Domaradzki said. “So now, fast-forward to the current time, last month we had to cancel programs at least three times because the roof was leaking.”
Tylec said the landlord is also seeking to more than double the city’s lease payments for the Senior Center.
The Rec operates in the Hope Center at 383 Vandervoort St., in space leased from Lumber City Church. Domaradzki called the church a stable landlord for a program that has been moved around the city repeatedly, but said the space is tight.
“So, we really are very grateful for that. That being said, space is limited there. The biggest space we have is a beautiful gym,” he said. “The kids love the gym. But if you’re not there for the gym, we have two small side rooms, and that’s pretty much it.”
What would be built
Under the plan, the city would add onto the front of the Keller building with a multipurpose room, a kitchen, a fitness center and a full-size gymnasium with a walking track above it. The finished building would total 35,000 square feet. The Senior Center would get an activity room, a craft room and a library. The youth center would get an arcade and separate “quiet” and “loud” rooms.
City officials said the Keller building needed roof, HVAC and accessibility work even without the expansion. The building now houses a Niagara County Department of Motor Vehicles office and the city’s parks and recreation offices, and most of those tenants would stay.
Youth center staff said they are looking forward to it. “I mean, we’ve made do throughout the years of, like, sharing spaces with other people. But we could definitely use a space of our own just to have that freedom of doing what we’d like to do,” said Lymiek Brunson, a youth center supervisor and eight-year city employee.
Another supervisor, Nicholas Sciandra, has seen the renderings. “It’s going to be beautiful. It’s not like Highmark Stadium, but it looks very nice,” he said.
What it could cost a homeowner
Without any outside help, the owner of a typical city home assessed at $100,000 would pay as much as $80 more a year in property taxes over the 30-year life of the bond, Tylec said, adding that the figure may end up lower.
That depends on grants. The city is applying again to a state fund for recreation projects after its application was rejected last year, and it is also seeking help from Empire State Development and Niagara County. Tylec said that no matter how much grant money comes in, the city will stop paying rent for the two centers and will save some money on staffing.
“In the long term, it’s a smart move to make here,” Tylec said. “We won’t have to do major renovations for 30-plus years, with the lifespan of buildings.”
The city was not required to put the question to voters, but officials wanted residents to have a say. A year ago, Grand Island voters rejected a plan to spend nearly $10 million buying a car dealership and turning it into a recreation complex.
“We saw the 61% in favor of it, so that was very pleasing. That shows the quality of life that’s important to communities,” Domaradzki said.
What happens next
Design work is set to resume this month. “If everything goes well, we should be able to go out to bid sometime next summer, and then projected completion of construction would be at the end of ’28,” Tylec said.
Still open: how much grant money the city lands, what happens with the Senior Center lease until 2028, and whether bids come in near the $15.5 million estimate. The project returns to the Common Council as design and bidding move ahead. The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the mayor’s office about the grant timeline and the lease and will update this story with any response.
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