Pottstown must do more to keep YMCA open

The recent announcement that the Pottstown YMCA will close its doors in June 2018 has been felt by many in this area as though a bomb dropped on us. To allow that organization to fold is absurd and Pottstown Town Council does nothing about it.

According to the article in The Mercury, the YMCA is way behind in their debts and they don’t have money to make repairs needed for the building. Has town council ever heard of giving tax breaks to them and other businesses who are struggling like Phoenixville did? They surely don’t have a problem giving the Hill School a break and in fact don’t charge them anything at all despite them being very well off financially and easily able to pay their fair share. Instead all we hear is taxes will be raised again for residents to the tune of 18.6 percent. Where do the stiffs in town council think that money is coming from? The people in this town are already taxed to their gills.

You look around the Pottstown area and see the progress that is going on. Phoenixville has arisen almost from the ashes, Spring City and Royersford are both doing much better, and the Coventry Mall, sold at auction recently, has turned the corner and is a fun place to shop again.

Pottstown, meanwhile, continues to look like a rundown, old time Western town with very little shopping but plenty of parking lots. Each time I drive through Pottstown I look closely for the tumbleweed rolling down the streets! And why? For one thing they need to hire someone with a vision for Pottstown, a vision that would restore the old Reading Train Station and make it a focal point of the downtown area. Another improvement would be to remove the less fortunate people from the main street and send them back to Norristown. Another suggestion would be to encourage cruising once again on High Street and have the stores, what small amount of them there are, open in the evening.

I was born and raised in Pottstown in the small community of Penn Village (now Bright Hope) and it was always a joy to get on the town bus and go into downtown Pottstown to the movies or shop. There isn’t much of that anymore! The Hippodrome is gone. The Bahr Arcade building is gone. The Shuler House is gone. So many of the fine big buildings in town are no longer here because someone without a vision had them torn down.

Why does Pottstown keep hiring those managers who say they have plans for the town but never come through? Instead hire the person who brought Phoenixville back to life or the person who raised the mall back up. What is so hard about that?

— Rich Hillegass Pottstown