COPPERHILL, Tenn. — A termite army has stopped renovations at Copperhill City Hall, Mayor Herb Hood said.

City Hall is in a former YMCA building that included the gym and three floors of meeting rooms. Copperhill had received a grant to revamp the building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Mr. Hood said a new roof was put on over the summer and window replacements were about to begin.

“But we found out the gym floor supports were eaten up by the termites,” he said, and now money that was to be used for the other work is being funneled into the floor replacement.

Tennessee Copper Co. built the YMCA in 1923 for its workers. The city took ownership in 1984 but didn’t have money to maintain the building, Mr. Hood said.

Over the years the roof began leaking, and the third-floor ceiling fell down. Mr. Hood remembers a rainstorm when the city clerk’s office on the first floor had water running through the ceiling.

Mr. Hood said the floor at the rear of the gym had a significant sway for years, but city officials thought it had just buckled.

But when Ross Construction workers began to look into the uneven floor, they discovered most of the floor supports had been damaged by the wood-eating insects.

Parts of the wall and foundation are underground, and moisture from the soil was ideal for the spread of the termites, Mr. Hood said. Workers found signs that the floor had been repaired earlier, he said.

This week, contractors unloaded steel beams that will be used to build floor supports under the gym.

Volunteers, many from the Kiwanis Club that meets in the building, have helped with sprucing up. Kiwanis member Cecil Arp said members painted the rooms and fixed up a kitchen with stoves, microwaves and a refrigerator.

The project is funded from a $100,000 U.S. Rural Development grant with a matching $200,000 from a low-interest city loan.

The roof repairs cost $47,000. Officials said they don’t yet know how much the floor is going to cost.

Construction worker David Cross is overseeing the gymnasium work. He and two other workers have torn out the old floor and floor joists and soon will install the floor girders.

Mr. Cross said the only difficulty he sees is “a lot of hard and dirty work.”

Mr. Hood hoped the gym work would be done in time for Christmas, but the extensive damage means February is a more likely date.

“We want to make it a community center,” he said of the gymnasium and several adjoining rooms. He remembers when the building was a center of community events with basketball games, refreshment stands and crowds cheering on their teams.

He said the city will seek more grant money for other repairs and renovation work on the building.

Since the entire building is on the historic register, the arched windows on the front will have to be replaced with exact duplicates, he said. That will be a costly and probably longer-term project, he said.