Property swap gives after-school club a permanent home

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

A three-way property swap between Key West and the Monroe County School Board will give the local Boys & Girls Club the home it has been looking for.

Key West City Commissioners voted 6-1 recently to accept the deed for the two smaller buildings behind the former Glynn Archer School on White Street, which the city is in the process of converting into the new city hall. The school board had kept ownership of the two buildings, formerly a gym and adjoining locker room on the Glynn Archer property after donating the main building to the city.

In return for handing over ownership of the two buildings to the city, commissioners agreed to turn an equipment building in Bayview Park into a permanent home for the Southernmost Boys & Girls Club, which currently houses its after school program in the dilapidated Reynolds School on South Street. That will free up Reynolds School for the school board to reclaim as a working educational facility.

“In my 14 years, we’ve had to move at least four times,” Boys & Girls Club Executive Director Don Dombrowski said. “We’ve been in buildings that have been condemned. We’ve been in buildings [where] the roof leaks. These are things we had to deal with and we still kept the club going.”

City officials have proposed spending $500,000 on the Bayview Park building to turn it into a permanent home for the club. The money will come out of the $2 million the city received as its share of the BP oil spill settlement.

As for what the city will do with the two buildings on the Glynn Archer campus, city manager Jim Scholl said nothing has been decided. A first step will be to replace the roofs and do some all-around clean up.

“Obviously, this will give us the property control over all of it. We don’t know right off what to do with it. It could be additional office space or additional storage space, although that’s not the best use of it,” he said.

The dissenting vote came from Commissioner Margaret Romero, who said she was not opposed to the deal but to the fact that a non-profit organization was now tied to a property swap between two municipal agencies. Romero suggested breaking the deed hand-over and the Bayview Park building donation to the Boys & Girls Club into two separate resolutions.

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