City’s ‘glaring’ needs
How will Allentown pay for the new Central Fire Station and police headquarters it wants?
Allentown’s largest fire station, Central Fire, is a 100-year old building that used to be a Chrysler car dealership before it was converted in the 1950s.
The 1920s-era building is plagued by roof leaks, pests, lack of storage space and even pieces falling off the building facade. These issues have been ongoing for years, but the city has not yet replaced the building because it does not have the funding to do so.
“Seventy years of use out of this building that was never meant to be a fire station,” said deputy fire Chief Christian Williams said. “It’s old, obsolete, it can’t meet our needs.”
The city’s central police headquarters next to City Hall is also in need of replacement, city leaders say. Police Chief Charles Roca said the space is outdated and too small for a growing police force.
Now the city wants to replace both, but three large questions remain: How much will replacing them cost, how will the city pay for it, and where will they even go?
Feasibility
Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk, who is set to present the city’s 2024 budget Monday, declined to discuss details about the city’s finances before that budget is public. But he called the replacement of Central Fire and the police headquarters some of the city’s “most glaring” infrastructure needs.
Tuerk called Allentown a “city of deferred maintenance” during his 2023 budget address, and said the city is likely to see a tax increase in 2024 to finance much-needed infrastructure investments.
The city received a lifeline via the American Rescue Plan, which granted $57 million to use for infrastruc
ture investments, revenue replacement and community projects. The city already dedicated $20 million toward much-needed infrastructure investments — including $5 million to replace stormwater pipes, some of which were over 100 years old — $4.2 million in water main replacements and $2 million in sanitary sewer lining replacements.
But millions more are likely needed to address all of the city’s infrastructure issues, with the police and fire station being first in line.
It’s unclear how much replacements will cost. The city in June awarded the consultant Alloy5 a contract to complete a feasibility study on relocating the city’s police headquarters, the results of which should be made public by the end of the year.
The city also issued a request for proposals and is deliberating on a consultant to award a similar contract to evaluate replacing Central Fire. According to Tuerk, once awarded, the feasibility study takes around five to six months.
The city could use remaining American Rescue Plan funds to replace the two stations, but faces pressure from city activists and some council members to use ARPA dollars on community needs like affordable housing and anti-gun violence initiatives.
The city did, however, use $2.4 million in American Rescue Plan dollars to fund its newly constructed Fire Academy building, which was unveiled in August. The former academy facility was a small classroom in a garage on Lehigh Street, which Allentown firefighters union president Jeremy Warmkessel said was “not a conducive learning environment.”
Conditions
But even as Allentown firefighters benefit from that newest investment,
they struggle under the conditions at Central Fire, the city’s largest and most centrally located fire station.
Williams and Fire Chief Efrain Agosto, at a tour of Central Fire station in September, laid out a laundry list of urgent issues with
the building.
The station’s “living quarters” is just one large room with two rows of single beds, and the ceiling is splattered with orange water stains. The air conditioning unit in that area of the building is broken, so large fans are
positioned throughout the first floor.
On the stairwell, cracks of light shine through bricks — time has worn down the very walls that keep the building insulated.
“We have been chasing these problems for years,”
Williams said.
According to city spokesperson Genesis Ortega, Allentown has spent at least $129,000 on repairs to Central Fire station since 2018, from emergency roof repairs to asbestos abatement. The exact figure might be even higher because the city did not always keep adequate record of these expenditures, Ortega said.
Beyond just those structural issues, the building isn’t equipped for a 21st century fire workforce, department leaders say. Allentown has never had a female firefighter, and Central Fire is not positioned to accommodate the first. The women’s bathroom on the first floor is significantly smaller than the men’s, and the building has just one changing area for both genders.
The city’s EMT department, which also operates out of Central Fire, handles about 19,000 calls a year, and its fire department handles about 14,000.
Allentown police, the city’s largest public safety department, handled more than 90,000 calls in 2022.
While the police station doesn’t have as dire of structural issues as the Central Fire station, Roca said their headquarters has efficiency and capacity problems.
One of those problems is simply that it’s hard to find. The police station on Hamilton Street is underneath a pedestrian bridge that connects the city parking garage to City Hall, and is set back from the sidewalk by a large, empty, concrete plaza, largely obscuring it from view from the road.
The building can sometimes be a tight squeeze for the 70 officers that work out of it, Roca said.
“We don’t want the Taj Mahal, but we do want to expand,” Roca said.
Roca and Assistant Chief James Gress gave a reporter a tour of the police headquarters, but did not permit taking any photos.
It was constructed in 1963 — Roca says the “outdated” building forces the department to “MacGyver” the space it has, constantly adapting the uses of different rooms.
A former county courtroom is now used for evidence collection. What used to be the detective
bureau is now the police’s youth division, where there are holding cells for youth, Police Athletic League offices and its community outreach center. A single-stall bathroom was converted into a drug testing space.
It is also running out of storage space — by necessity, Allentown police keep a lot of paper records because Lehigh County still keeps most of its legal records on paper. Shelves and shelves of paper files are stowed away in a small room connected to the Criminal Investigations Unit.
But the most glaring issue with the building is an inaccessible cavity right at its center. Behind a walled-off space in the middle of the building’s second floor is the tall ceiling of the former courtroom on the first floor.
The closed-off cavity means the building’s second floor is a square-shaped hallway instead of a large open space, limiting how much of the building can actually be used.
Allentown has looked into breaking down the walls to add more space to the building, but previously found it to be “cost-prohibitive,” Gress said.
“We outgrew this space long ago,” he said.
Roca’s vision for the department’s future is having all officers “under one roof.” In addition to their headquarters, Allentown police have a large building on 10th and Hamilton streets, where the city’s patrol officers as well as its fleet are stationed.
That building has faced its own issues — the city has spent thousands repairing roof leaks and replacing doors at the patrol station. Though the feasibility study will lay out a concrete plan, Roca said he hopes the station can grow via an expansion or rebuild of the existing building.
What’s next?
Replacing both police and fire buildings will be a unique challenge.
The way Williams sees it, the fire department has two options: Find a new, nearby site to rebuild or repurpose into a fire station, or knock down the existing Central Fire building and construct into a modern one.
But both of these options present challenges. For one, in the city’s dense Center City neighborhood, it will be challenging to find a site big enough to accommodate a new fire station that can house firetrucks, ambulances and the other portions of the building like break rooms, offices and storage.
But rebuilding at Central Fire’s current site on Chew Street means the department will have to find a temporary space to operate out of while construction is ongoing, which could also be a major challenge.
“A relocation is the best case scenario,” Williams said.
An expansion of the police headquarters also will likely require a temporary relocation; Roca said police are looking to stay on or near their current site at 425 Hamilton St.
Further, neither will be cheap. Feasibility studies will lay out the exact cost of replacing the two stations, but it will likely be in the several millions.
Though Tuerk declined to say if the city has a plan to fund the construction, he said in his 2023 budget address that a slight tax increase is necessary to finance infrastructure investments.
Allentown most recently had a tax increase in 2019, when former Mayor Ray O’Connell vetoed City Council’s proposed budget, which did not include a tax hike, and enacted a 27% increase.
O’Connell did so, according to a city news release, because the city’s current financial position was “not sufficient to handle the daily responsibilities of city operations.”
Before that, the city had not seen a tax increase since 2005 — many other cities, including neighboring Bethlehem and Easton, had enacted increases during that time period.
Former four-term Mayor Ed Pawlowski, currently serving a 15-year prison sentence for corruption and pay-to-play schemes, never enacted an increase.
Even with the 2019 increase and an injection of money from ARPA, the city is not where it needs to be financially. The city’s most recent five-year plan projects annual deficits of $2.2 million to $3.2 million through 2025, meaning the city would have to deplete its cash reserves if it does not hike taxes or cut spending.
Former Allentown Finance Director Seth O’Neill had pushed for the city to enact a series of small, scheduled tax increases over a period of several years to address the city’s financial needs.
Bina Patel, the city’s current finance director who was hired earlier this year, declined to say if she agreed with O’Neill’s assessment because the city had not yet finalized its 2024 budget.
City leaders say upgraded police and fire headquarters will help bring Allentown’s public safety into the 21st century. But without millions on hand to pay for them, it will need a plan to finance the necessary upgrades.
“The challenges of city finances are similar year over year,” Tuerk said. “The decisions of past leaders has an impact.”