The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Hospital work stopped
Construction on state grounds suspended as Wolf intervenes at request of local officials; forum on project’s future scheduled
NORRISTOWN » The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS) will host a listening session on the future of Norristown State Hospital Nov. 29 at Norristown Municipal Hall, 235 E. Airy St., from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
The forum comes weeks after construction was halted on an expansion of the forensic unit at Building 10, which was slated to open in mid-December and was mandated by the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU to improve services and shorten wait times for people in jail awaiting court-ordered competency restoration treatment.
Work on the new building was stopped after a request to Gov. Tom Wolf’s office by Norristown officials and state Rep. Matt Bradford, D-70, who argued that the community had not been consulted with regard to new construction within their
jurisdiction.
But members of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association and psychological services providers at the hospital have a number of unanswered questions: What happened to the money —reportedly $5 million — paid for the project? What does this mean for those languishing in correctional facilities, instead of being evaluated in the forensic unit? And what about the current and future hires who were supposed to work at the new facility?
The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services released a statement saying it “intends to comply fully with the ACLU settlement, but temporarily halted further construction in order to more thoroughly engage the Norristown community in the conversation around the short term use of Building 10 and future opportunities for reuse of the larger state hospital property in light of the planned closure of the civil units.”
“First and foremost, typically when you would do a construction of a facility in a community, you would actually let the community know what’s going on,” said Norristown Municipal Administrator Crandall Jones. “When we became aware of it, our concern is we did not know anything about it. They had not reached out to us about it at all to let our elected officials know, to let me and the administration know, to let our fire and police know what was going on out on the grounds, but they’re grounds that we’re expected to be responders to if incidents happen out there.”
Jones said once the administration got wind of the construction, they reached out to Bradford and contacted the governor’s office, DHS and the Pennsylvania Department of General Services to voice their concerns.
“From the state’s perspective, there was a communications lapse on their part but typically what happens, if they’re going to construct a facility of that of type, they would talk to the community,” Jones said. “So our position was, wait a minute, you’re at the beginning of a construction phase and we didn’t even know it was happening, so we need to talk about that in the short term, but what’s the longterm plan? Because there has been, years before I came to Norristown, multiple efforts by multiple councils and multiple administrations for the state hospital grounds in Norristown to be ultimately developed for mixed-use development.”
Bradford acknowledged that the commonwealth is under court order to deal with overcrowding in the forensic unit and the facility was being built to deal with that overflow, but said “in conversations with borough council, my office and the governor’s office, basically there was not an appropriate level of consultation with the community and the commonwealth.”
Bradford said Norristown had threatened to get a court injunction to stop the construction, but that became unnecessary when the governor’s office stepped in.
He spoke with NSH employees shortly after the decision was made,
“Understandably, they are obviously concerned about their current employment and the assurance was that current employees would not be affected,” he said of the meeting. “I have the deepest respect for our commonwealth employees and realized that they thought the project was heading in one direction and obviously they knew I was advocating for a halt until the community got a chance to be appropriately informed about what was going on at the property.
“I thought it was the appropriate level of respect for any commonwealth employee to tell them why I was asking for a stoppage of this project.”
Both Bradford and Jones spoke of a protracted process in which local officials have dealt with a number of gubernatorial administrations to find common ground on a plan of mixed use for NSH grounds, which has a number of vacant and dilapidated buildings. Bradford also said he had been contacted by the Norristown police and fire departments regarding public safety concerns on the campus.
“What I want is a master plan,” he said. “My view is Building 10 has brought this to a head to have a much larger discussion on all of these issues and to bring the community in too because for far too long I think the community has not been given the proper respect of having that dialogue. I think we’re finally having the long-term discussions about what uses are placed at the state hospital with community support for anything that’s going to be built up there.”