Mulls transfer of ownership of Five Towns Community Center to social services operator
by Collin Nash
Facing public pressure, Nassau County officials decided yesterday not to sell the Five Towns Community Center and proposed transferring ownership to the operators of the social services program.
With a looming multimillion-dollar budget gap, the administration of County Executive Thomas Suozzi wanted to sell the facility to cut the cost of running the center.
“The county all along said it wanted to get out of the landlord business, and we were always looking to find someone who could maintain the property and continue running the programs,” said Marilyn Gottlieb, the chief deputy county executive.
Gottlieb said after yesterday's public hearing before the county planning commission that the proposal will ultimately be presented to the county legislature, where it will be voted on next year.
“The details of the contract are still being ironed out,” she said. Jonathan Davis, executive director of the center since 1989, greeted the news with mixed reaction.
“It’s a mixed blessing because we will have to figure out how to get funding to run the building and improve the run-down infrastructure,” Davis said. “Now, though, the center can control its fate. But it’s going to take a great deal of work.”
The Five Towns Community Center provides a wide array of social service programs — including Head Start, after-school activities and child care, HIV-AIDS and drug counseling, and services for the foreign-born and senior citizens.
Those services for hundreds of mostly black and Hispanic residents from surrounding communities were in danger of being lost. Suozzi officials mulled the idea of selling the 41,000-square-foot building and the seven acres of property to the Jewish Center of the Greater Five Towns.
“The Five Towns center, created by a wealthy woman in 1907, deeded its seven acres on the border of Lawrence and Inwood to Nassau in 1974 in return for a 50-year lease and construction of a new building that was to be maintained by the county,” officials said.
“There were various avenues we could have gone down,” Gottlieb said. “But this seems to satisfy the various concerns that had been expressed by various groups worried about the program's demise.”
