Pictured here is the YMCA facility you will be walking into just over a year from now. With a $12 million fundraising campaign completed at the close of 2011 – some five years after it began – this winter marks the long-awaited commencement of construction.

“We got a little later jump on moving dirt due to the planning and permitting process, but we’re still on track for a January 2014 grand opening,” says Grand Traverse Bay YMCA CEO Tom Van Deinse of the new West Silver Lake Road facility in Traverse City.

Coming January 2014: An aquatics center, featuring a recreation pool and a competitive length lap pool, a tennis facility, and a fitness center. A gymnasium, however, is not part of the project’s first phase. “We will continue to use the gym at our current facility on Racquet Club Drive,” Van Deinse says. “We need to raise money for the gym in another phase.”

Garfield Township officials earlier this year approved some amendments to the YMCA’s special use permit in an effort to get “design change efficiencies” in the footprint of the building, according to Van Deinse.  “They were changes in design, but no functional changes,” he says. “It’s the same plan.”

This most recent rendering of the entrance (above), provided by the YMCA, does show some minor modifications from the project’s photo gallery available at the Y’s website gtbayymca.org.

Traverse City’s Brayton & Sons Excavating started the new Y’s site construction a few weeks ago after winning the contract with a bid of $768,000, according to Van Deinse. But the first structure passers-by will notice going up this winter is the tennis facility – a barn structure that will house six courts.

“The tennis center is a pre-engineered building and is the largest part of the facility, and it will go up quickly,” says Van Deinse. D & K Engineered Construction based in Grand Rapids won the steel contract for the facility at “roughly $1 million,” he adds.

With two of the three bid packets in, the project is right on budget. However, Y officials are anxiously awaiting the third and final financial piece of the $10 million project – for “everything else” in the first phase with a budget of approximately $8 million – due in a few weeks.

There are alternate design plans in that third bid packet in the event the bids come in high, Van Deinse says. Spence Brothers is the construction manager for this first phase, and is representing the YMCA on all contracts.