Plea for Youth Focus at RECenter

Pointing to a recent uptick in youth drug overdoses and suicides, Walker Bragman, a representative of the East End New Leaders, last week stressed the need for the community to provide more social and recreational options for teens and reiterated a call for a shift in focus at the East Hampton Y.M.C.A. RECenter, which he said has moved away from its mission as a youth center.

Speaking at a town board meeting last Thursday, he called the RECenter under management of the Y.M.C.A. “essentially a gym for adults.” The organization operates the town-owned building under a licensing agreement with East Hampton Town.

“Have a stage upstairs, have a music area, have a lounge,” he said. “As a community we can take positive steps to address this problem . . . provide them an alternative to these party houses that have been cropping up,” Mr. Bragman said.

“Free play,” or unstructured time to be with friends in a safe setting, is essential for youth, Mr. Bragman said, and can held them resist “the appeal of drugs.”

“Our approach has to change,” he said. “If we even save one life, it will be worth it.”

He said the New Leaders would present a business plan to the town in the coming months as to how the RECenter building could be used after next year when the Y.M.C.A.’s current contract with the town expires. It should not be renewed, he said.

In a letter presented by Susan McGraw Keber, who is Mr. Bragman’s mother, Dr. Martin Diner, a school psychologist who lives in East Hampton, described how he was “struck . . . by the absence of activity venues for teenagers” in East Hampton. “Our kids are dangerously bored,” he wrote. The options presented are “out of step with the developmental needs of our young population” between 12 and 20 years old, he said in his letter. “Too many have died, and will continue to do. We share the responsibility.”

But others spoke positively of the Y.M.C.A. RECenter and its programs. “I’ve seen a lot of good things that the Y does,” said Afton DiSunno, the mother of a high school boy who participates in RECenter activities. He and his friends go to the facility after school, she said. “There are lots of things for them to do in our town; it’s not all bad.”

Jack Marshall, a RECenter employee who also spoke, ticked off the array of activities: swimming lessons, swim team, synchronized swimming, soccer, basketball, lessons in karate, dance, and music, reduced-cost theater trips, camps during the summer and school breaks, an annual Healthy Kids day, and weekly Friday Night Madness exclusively for youth. Beginning next month, there will be Saturday programs featuring sports, arts and crafts, and science, technology, engineering, arts, and math activities.

The top floor of the RECenter building, said Ms. McGraw Keber, used to be a social space for youth, but is now filled with exercise bikes. “Having to be programmed at all times is, I think, missing the point,” she said.

“With all the good things that are going on, we’re still missing something,” another speaker said, “because we’re still losing kids to drugs and alcohol.”

“There is a problem in our community,” acknowledged Mr. Marshall, who grew up in East Hampton and returned to his hometown in 2012 after graduating from college. “Instead of pointing the finger I think we all need to come together and realize this is a community issue and not a Y.M.C.A. issue,” he said.

“Youth development and self-confidence and core values are so much of what we do there,” said Norma Bushman, another employee of the Y.M.C.A.

“It starts at home,” said Samone Johnson, the Y’s medical director. “A lot of kids don’t have supervision, so they don’t want to go to a place with supervision.”

Kira Leader read a letter from her mother, Jacqui Leader, which referenced her son and Kira’s brother, Sax Leader, who died of an overdose in 2013 in New York City.

Drug use is widespread, Ms. Leader told the board. “This town is really suffering for not having a place where youth, 13 and up, can go to be together,” she said. Teens did gather at the RECenter for a while, she said. “I don’t understand when it changed or why.”

“If it’s a publicly funded facility, then it should be benefiting the public equally. There are not that many community spaces; everything is privatized,” Tyler Armstrong told the board. The now-empty building on town land in Wainscott that once held the Child Development Center of the Hamptons could be an “excellent community center,” he suggested. There should be a survey soliciting young people’s opinions, he said, as to “what they actually want.”

Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said that a teen advisory board could be created, and could work with the East End New Leaders and with the Y.M.C.A. to “figure out a way we want to move forward.” She said 44 percent of the Y.M.C.A. RECenter’s members are under 18.

The town has inquired about the purchase of the former C.D.C.H. building, she said, but there is a lack of agreement on the price. If the purchase could take place, what is needed, she said, is an independent entity that would manage the facility for the town.

“The drug and alcohol abuse issue throughout our town is a serious issue,” Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said. The town provides funding for counseling and drug abuse treatment programs, has police officers doing outreach in the schools, provides youth recreation programs, and has sponsored training sessions in the use of Narcan, an antidote to opioid overdoses.

There is a “space problem,” at the RECenter building, the supervisor said, but also “a lot of good going on.” An administrator for East Hampton Village, which donated the RECenter land, when the building was constructed, Mr. Cantwell said that “the mission at that time was for that to be a youth center. What happens at that facility today . . . has evolved over time, and it’s different — and that’s not a bad thing.”

A Y.M.C.A. Correction

A story in The Star last week reported that Walker Bragman of the East End New Leaders, a group that is advocating for more space dedicated to youth at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, asserted that the Y.M.C.A. had turned the center, which was built to serve primarily as a youth center, into a “for-profit gym.”

Under its current operating license with East Hampton Town, which owns the RECenter building, the town provides the Y.M.C.A. with $590,000 each year for operating expenses at the facility and is responsible for capital improvements to the building.

Under the contract, the Y.M.CA. is allowed to retain 10 percent of the income derived from operating the facility as an operating fee.

Once annual operating expenses are met, any revenue beyond that must be returned to East Hampton Town for a capital improvement reserve fund.

  Last year, $29,000 was returned to the town, and in 2014, approximately $27,000 was returned.