A judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to halt demolition of the Malcolm Yonge Community Center, meaning organizers might now have less than a week to gather the thousands of signatures necessary to force a referendum on the building’s fate.
A coalition of local residents has been pushing since last month to save the 60-year-old building, after the Pensacola City Council voted to support Mayor D.C. Reeves' effort to demolish it and use the underlying property to subsidize the development of affordable housing.
The lawsuit, filed by former mayoral candidate Jonathan Green, seeks a temporary injunction to allow him and nine other petitioners time to gather the 4,138 signatures necessary to place the issue before voters.
Under the Pensacola City Charter, organizers have 60 days to gather those signatures. However, their efforts could be rendered moot if the city were to demolish the structure before they pass that bar. The city sent letters to residents of the surrounding neighborhod on Feb. 16, notifying them that this could happen as soon as March 4.
In rejecting Green’s request for an injunction, Judge J.J. Frydrychowicz cited “procedural and substantive deficiencies” in the complaint and gave Green 14 days to file an “appropriate pleading.”
Organizer Missy Ward said Friday that her group was making “very good progress” in gathering the necessary signatures, though she said she could not provide the total number. A related petition on Change.org had garnered just 213 signatures by Friday evening. Ward said that petition was not created by her group.
Ward and her fellow organizer have argued that the city has a shortage of recreational space for at-risk children.
“It's not even just the athletics or the tutoring,” Ward said, “but it's having them a place to go that's safe and it keeps them out of trouble.”
Fred Gunther, a local real estate developer who is also involved with the referendum effort, said he’d been motivated by his own experience as a father.
“I got involved in this because my son's 12,” he said, “and he loves basketball. And until he started playing a few years ago, I had no idea what a shortage of gym space we had around here. There's a lot of kids in town who would love to be able to participate in these programs, but they are unable to because ... the folks that run them don't have the space for them ... To find available gyms, we go from here to Milton.”
Gunther solicited a quote from an Arizona-based company that placed the cost of repairing and reinforcing the Malcolm Yonge arches at $239,500.
“It doesn't make sense to tear down a gym that would cost, you know, two to three million dollars to replace if you can repair it for $240,000,” he said, “especially when there's such a need for the space in the community.”
Reeves has disputed the accuracy of this estimate, saying it could cost more than $240,000 just to safely produce a reliable structural assessment, and argued that it would be irresponsible to spend more money to repair the gym when there are so many competing needs.
Reeves has made affordable housing one of his administration’s key priorities. The Pensacola Young Professionals’ 2023 Quality of Life survey revealed 87% of those surveyed countywide felt negatively about the availability of affordable housing, and 92% of city residents felt the availability was either poor or fair.
The city had budgeted funds to renovate the gym as recently as 2020, when the Pensacola City Council voted to move $715,000 budgeted for this purpose to instead refurbish Magee Field. Two former councilmembers who supported that move, Ann Hill and Sherri Myers, are now supporting the referendum effort.
To download a petition or sign up to have a petition delivered to you, visit savepensacola.com.
