Pottstown took on the YMCA - and won. They're saving themselves along the way. | Maria Panaritis
You'd think the YMCA would be the moral conscience in this story. But in Pottstown, Pa., that role goes to the community, and a hero named Chuck Gulati.
There are so many heroes in this story, I almost don't know which of them to begin praising first.
For starters, they include the people of Pottstown. And a Phoenixville native named Chuck Gulati. And even a few politicians (hold your chests, I know!) Let's also include the until-very-recently-reviled regional YMCA network, an avowedly mission-minded group that became Public Enemy No. 1 last winter by announcing plans to close shop this summer in Pottstown, one of largely affluent Montgomery County's poorest zip codes.
In a scrum to save the Y, all came together in a fight unlike any this town has seen in decades. This onetime factory hub on the Schuylkill between Philly and Reading has lost its manufacturing, its middle class, and, just last year, a $1 million taxpayer when its local hospital turned nonprofit. But moxie dies hard in this place.
On Wednesday, against the backdrop of possible protests ahead of next month's planned closure of the Pottstown branch of the Philadelphia Freedom Valley YMCA, the nonprofit group that touts "social responsibility" as a core value announced an about-face.
Instead of ditching a decades-old facility that the regional network no longer wanted to spend millions to maintain, it found a buyer: Gulati, 47, a YMCA member from Gilbertsville. Instead of closing, the Y now becomes a tenant to Gulati, who with his family also helped save the historic onetime dance hall in Pottstown, Sunnybrook Ballroom.
Just as his dad, entrepreneur Jack Gulati, kept Reading from losing its minor-league hockey team a few years ago by buying the squad, Chuck is Pottstown's mini Superman.
The YMCA are the ones you would expect to have the bleeding hearts in a story like this. But Chuck, who once thought he'd spend his life working with kids, is the guy with the extraordinary moral conscience in this script.
Many who fought the Y's closure pointed to how Pottstown, with a median income in the $40,000 range and many students receiving free school lunches, could not afford to lose this place. The Y was providing membership discounts to half its members, including from the borough's sizable minority population. The local NAACP (a racially and ethnically diverse chapter) vigorously opposed the move; area school boards opposed it through resolutions; police also fought the move.
A citizen task force assembled by the Conshohocken-based YMCA mothership to assess the decision also concluded it would be a mistake.
From the Y's perspective, shutting down smaller ones and consolidating into bigger, newer ones is an efficient way to stay financially viable. From the public's, it's an abrogation of their mission to keep local communities strong. Both are true.
Elliott says the Pottstown Y was operating at a loss in a building that would have required millions in upkeep.
The community was right to call out the Y for this apparent shift too far toward corporate efficiency at the expense of mission. Even local lawmakers made it clear they were unhappy, including Democratic County Commissioner Val Arkoosh. She and others like Republican Sen. Bob Mensch worked behind the scenes to help reverse the group's November announcement.
But it was Gulati who walked into the local Y in January and struck up a conversation with its director about why they were closing. The deal was done four months later.
I'd like to think Gulati's interest was rooted in something deeper than dollars and cents. He studied criminal justice in college before joining the family business. He's all in for Pottstown and its potential to revitalize.
Gulati deserves props for being "willing to put his neck out there and say, 'Let's go,' " activist/businessman Don Smale told me.
In the '60s, to protest that Sunnybrook had a pool that was off-limits to blacks, NAACP activists hopped the fences and jumped in, chapter president Johnny Corson told me. They got their own pool after that. Corson thought that spirit had died — until now.
Like I said: Moxie. They still make it here, folks.