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PORT HAWKESBURY, N.S. —

The Port Hawkesbury branch of the YMCA of Cape Breton will close its doors for good this month.

The board of directors voted to close the branch effective Feb. 22. CEO Andre Gallant cited increasing operational expenses that outweighed the facility’s revenues.

“This would be the hardest decision I’ve been involved with in my 12 years at the YMCA,” said Gallant. “It’s been a long time in the making where we’ve looked at alternatives, we’ve done full analysis, we considered the full impact on the community, on the members, on the staff, created alternate, mock scenarios — is there a different way to do services in the community?

“The ultimate conclusion was we can’t. It’s just been too costly. We’ve been losing money in this operation and it’s just time to turn that around.”

The Port Hawkesbury branch opened in 2004 and is located within the Port Hawkesbury Civic Centre. Approximately 500 members and nine part-time employees are affected by the closure. Members will have their pre-paid monthly and annual memberships reimbursed within the next two to three weeks.

YMCA of Cape Breton

Port Hawkesbury branch

Year opened: 2005

Members: Approximately 500

Employees: Nine part time

Closing date: Feb. 22, 2020

Gallant said staffing was the biggest cost the branch faced, followed by rent and then other bills like telecommunications, IT support and communications/marketing.

“We would be very comfortable if we (had) 600 (members), but we’ve never been able to achieve that at the price point that we also need,” Gallant said when asked how many members were needed to break even. “Port Hawkesbury is similar to the rest of Cape Breton Island. The economy here is soft, there’s outmigration and population decline, so year after year, keeping the same number of members as we’ve had is actually growth against population decline, but that doesn’t mean that those members can pay more and more each year to make up for the people who have left the community.

Andre Gallant

“There are price sensitivity issues here as well. You can only push the pricing so far before people choose to spend their discretionary money somewhere else.”

Gallant said they’ve had lengthy discussions with the Town of Port Hawkesbury, their landlord for the facility.

“We’ve been back and forth in different types of discussions with the town over multiple years actually,” he said. “We got some additional space to be able to offer the family program quite a number of years ago and back at that time, we had some grant money to purchase the equipment and the materials to offer those family programs. But we never had that breakthrough surge of 100 new members come to take out the memberships that would have given us that comfort on the revenue side.”

Brenda Chisholm-Beaton

Port Hawkesbury Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton said an emergency council meeting was held Friday afternoon to discuss the closure. One of the motions passed was for staff to come forward to their public meeting on Tuesday to talk about potential, short-term plans for the facility after Feb. 22.

She said the town owns the bulk of the equipment in the facility and they’re looking at operating it in the short term.

“Although the YMCA will no longer be the facility operator, we still have the gym facility and we’ll look at a short-term plan and identify some long-term plans of course,” she said. “With the idea being to minimize the impact to the citizens who have already made this facility part of their daily health and wellness routine.”

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