Activists opt action vs YMCA board

Toledo, Ohio - Cooper Suter, Mark Hertzfeld and Gary Batts have spent years paying for memberships at the South Toledo YMCA. Now, they’re about to spend hours with lawyers and pay for legal representation to protect it.

Despite YMCA President and CEO Robert Alexander’s Aug. 19 announcement that he set a Nov. 26 deadline to sell at least 500 new memberships to keep the South Y afloat, Suter said he is still pursuing legal action to obtain access to YMCA financial records.

“It’s an olive branch at best,” Suter said. “The process was wrong; the communication was wrong; they were trying to announce it without telling us. What they presented is not tenable; it’s an untenable plan they know they can make fail.”

State Sen. Teresa Fedor also said she didn’t trust the latest announcement because the board members or elected officials did not include her, Suter, Hertzfeld or Batts in their plans to save the YMCA. The three men found out about the 4 p.m. announcement at about 3 p.m. while being interviewed by Toledo Free Press.

“I think this is a quick patch-up,” Fedor said. “I don’t know if this is a fair deal or not.”

Describing Alexander’s announcement as a “PR move,” Suter said he isn’t going to buy into the 500-membership plan and he’s not going to lead the effort to try to sell them right now. He said seeking legal action to open up more public discussion and access financial records is more likely to succeed after the announcement.

“We’re members, we’re not customers, and they’re not Wal-Mart, they’re a not-for-profit association,” Suter said.

Suter added that he and his group would have been more willing to accept the 90-day stay and support the board members had they talked to him about their decision, rather than negotiate with Mayor Carty Finkbeiner first.

The three men said they are paying out of their own pockets and are hoping to obtain donations from the community to afford attorneys Fritz Byers and Scott Ciolek. Byers is an attorney also retained by The Blade.

Suter, Hertzfeld and Batts said they’ve taken it upon themselves to save the YMCA because it is such a valuable fixture in their community; not because of any aversion to CedarCreek Church or any personal vendetta they have against Alexander and the board’s salary.

The three of them found out about the potential closing by reading the news or by hearing it from employees at the front desk in the YMCA, they said. Cooper got involved quickly, after his 10-year-old daughter got so infuriated that she wrote letters to editors about the loss of the YMCA.

“[The Blade] was going off about the financials and I said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a whole other issue I don’t think you understand — how this thing is woven into the neighborhood for better or worse and the context of what it means in the neighborhood,” Suter said. “We got hit hard the last three years — foreclosures, gangs, graffiti, whatever it is.”

“We are aware there is a bigger chess game being played over us, but we do not believe we are pawns in that game.”

The three of them met because of the phone calls or letters they had written to stop the closing of the YMCA and, within a few days they were posting signs and calling meetings, assembling irate community members from all over the South End.

Change of mind

Their publicity efforts earned them approximately 70 people at a rally on Aug. 18 and a change of mind among the board members.

On Aug. 19, when Alexander announced he would keep the YMCA open until Nov. 26, aiming to accumulate more than $25,000 a month worth of three-year membership units, he said he was impressed by the residents’ passion to help save the YMCA.

Later that day, Alexander apologized to a packed town hall meeting of more than 150 people for not including the community in his decision to close the YMCA and give the building to CedarCreek Church.

“We moved quickly, maybe too quickly,” he said. “But imagine if you ran an organization and with less than three weeks, you found out that your organization was going to lose $2 million of state funding because of a new budget … I panicked, I think. I pulled the trigger. I was decisive. I looked at the system and I said, ‘What are we going to do, how can we trim a million dollars out of our system so that all of our YMCAs don’t go down?’”

YMCA Board Chairman Paul Schlatter said they chose the South Toledo YMCA because its membership was one of the lowest of all branches. Compared to its most similar YMCA on the west side, the South Toledo YMCA has 957 members, whereas the West YMCA has 1,800, he said.

The building also needs at least $1 million worth of repairs because it loses about $30,000 a month, Alexander said.

If 500 new memberships are sold, each contracted for three years, the costs should help cover the losses, while the board members look for a new location for the South Toledo YMCA and sketch design plans.

“We are going to swallow that loss until November,” Alexander said.

Among many other problems, the building needs roof