Livonia Board stands firm on Jack Evans closure

By Aaron Hammond of the Livingston County News, 26 October 2016

The Hemlock School Building in Hemlock NY.

The Livonia Town Board voted unanimously to pass its proposed 2017 budget Oct. 20 at its regularly scheduled meeting, but not before a small but vocal group of Livingston County residents used the meeting as an opportunity to plead their case to keep a Hemlock landmark alive.

The Jack Evans Community Center in Hemlock, which is slated for closure Nov. 1., after having its original June 1 closing date be pushed back five months by the town board during a meeting earlier this year.

The center, which is 12,000 square feet in size and is located at 4705 South Main St., was originally built as a school in Hemlock in 1929, and after years of different owners, was purchased by Jack Evans in 1982.

Some time after Evans purchased the building, it began beeing used as a community center by the small Livonia hamlet, housing local events and fundraisers and a small group of tenants who used its rooms as art studios and workshops. To keep the building from being closed and potentially auctioned off, the Little Lakes Sustainability Network and other residents from in and around Livingston County attempted to obtain a Federal 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, which would allow the organization to accept donations to potentially keep the center open.

Mary Ann Thompson, a Hemlock resident who has spearheaded the effort to save the center, addressed the council to plead the case for the effort to save the building and to ask for assistance in letting the community make one last attempt to keep their cause alive.

“At this point, our group has decided that financially we can’t take this on,” said Thompson. “We need to close this building, it’s expensive (but) we have neighbors in other towns that should and could and want to share the expense and I’m just asking that (the board) consider that before the building goes to auction.”

Bob Nielson, a Hemlock resident, said he was disappointed that the town’s proposed 2017 budget had no money allotted for the center, and that the board was not looking at the center’s potential as a beacon of the local community.

“I think you’re letting something really amazing go away,” said Nielson. “We have an incredible gift here, in the Finger Lakes region, this is a place where people come from all over the world to visit and what we proposed was a center where people could come and get information about the history of this area, run events for adults, for children, and everyone in-between. I think something that this town has never seen can take place right there in Hemlock.”

Nielson also believes Livonia would not be hurting itself financially if it let the center continue.

“We’re spending almost $2 million to add onto the library (but) we can’t spend $30,000 to $40,000 to get this building through another year?” he said. “It probably wouldn’t take a whole year to get together, get our 501(c)3 intact to raise the necessary funds.”

The problem Little Lakes was facing was generating funds to afford legal assistance in getting the 501(c)3 application off the ground, as well as finding time to put on events and attract prospective tenants to prove the center was still viable for Hemlock as well as any surrounding communities.

“None of us have the money to go out and pay a $1,000 retainer fee to a lawyer; a $150 fee to the attorney to even meet with us so we could explain to him what we wanted to do,” said Honeoye resident Bonnie Sykes. “A lot of the (money for the) events that have taken place in that (center) have come out of pockets of the people that are trying to get the events in there. We couldn’t charge for the events, so we asked for donations.”

Little Lakes wound up raising, according to Sykes, more than $1,500 in donations from the community, to put the legal process to obtain the tax-exempt status into motion.

But the board stood firm in their original stipulations for extending the deadline on the center’s closure and that Little Lakes had to find a way to make the center financially viable, whether it be attracting more tenants to rent space or by obtaining the tax-exempt status.

“We said almost six months ago ‘come with the 501(c)3,’ and we haven’t had that offer yet,” said Livonia Supervisor Eric Gott.

Bob Thompson of Hemlock, however, argued that the board’s ultimatum wasn’t realistic, saying that the application process for 501(c)3 status can take from nine months up to a year, and wondered if Little Lakes was “set up to fail.”

“There’s no way we could’ve had a 501(c)3,” said Thompson. “We filed and did all the work for it, but given the parameters that we were given, it would’ve been an impossible task.”

After the center is closed Nov. 1, the next step is to have it declared as surplus property and eventually put up for auction to any bidder who wishes to take it off Livonia’s hands. Even though the board didn’t waiver in its decision to continue in this course, it said it wanted the center to continue to exist, but not as a financial burden to the town and its taxpayers.

“Right now, there are zero dollars budgeted for the Jack Evans Center; it is probable that this will remain the case at the close of this budget,” said Councilmember Angela Grouse. “However, that does not signal the closing of the door on this opportunity. Maybe that allows you guys to continue to work on your 501(c)3, finalize your business plan - we’re not passing the budget tonight and running to our first meeting in November to declare this surplus and running to the auctioneer by the second meeting.”

“We have a similar vision to your group,” said Gott. “The only part of our vision that’s different is that the town isn’t going to own the building. We still want that to be a community building, but in our vision that doesn’t include the town paying the bills.”