Council pays engineer who found flaws in pool redesign
Allentown is settling up with the engineer who dubbed the troublesome Cedar Beach Pool renovation a “nightmare” but helped turn the project around.
City Council on Wednesday approved a bill transferring $55,000 from various capital fund line items to cover a $75,000 final payment to Keystone Consulting Engineers of Wescosville.
Allentown hired Frank Clark of Keystone in July 2016, more than a year after it tapped another firm, Spillman Farmer Architects of Bethlehem, to do design work for renovations of all of the city’s pools, including Cedar Beach.
By the time the city brought Clark in on an emergency basis, the new Cedar Beach Pool was supposed to be open. But that spring, crews with MidAtlantic Construction had run into a series of “unforeseen conditions” as they excavated the site where the pool was supposed to be rebuilt.
Clark found several deficiencies in Spillman Farmer’s drawings. He also discovered that the pool walls, built in the 1960s, were “severely undersized” given the pool’s location in a flood plain. A $681,000 change order was needed to rebuild the walls so they’d remain structurally sound.
The project ultimately included 42 different change orders and cost Allentown taxpayers about $3.5 million. But city parks and recreation employees told council Wednesday that the price would have been even more exorbitant had they not brought Clark in when they did.
“If we would have moved forward without Frank, we would have been in worse shape,” Parks Superintendent Rick Holtzman said. “Bringing him on at that time helped us stop the issues and move forward with building a pool that’s functioning well today.”
The pool officially reopened Memorial Day 2018, then closed prematurely that August because of flooding.
It wasn’t without issues this summer, either. The pool was closed for about a week in July after its main motor was irreparably damaged by water from a broken pipe discovered in the pool’s pump house.
Allentown had $19,670 left in its pools capital fund entering Wednesday, so city administrators asked to transfer $25,500 from a parks equipment line item, $18,000 from a park facility repairs line item and $11,459 from funds previously allocated for the Jordan Skate Park.
The city received the Keystone invoice last year, but it needed additional details justifying the total cost before paying it, city officials said.
Mayor Ray O’Connell said that he believes this is the final invoice related to the reconstruction project.
“Frank did a good job,” Council Vice President Julio Guridy said. “But this is a saga that’s been going on for a long time.”
It’s not entirely over. Allentown sued Spillman and MidAtlantic earlier this year, and MidAtlantic in turn sued Allentown, Spillman and a number of other subcontractors for unpaid overhead costs.
Council held an executive session prior to Wednesday’s meeting to discuss the matter, but took no action.
The pool debacle played a role in former Mayor Ed Pawlowski’s criminal trial in 2018. Pawlowski was convicted of steering the pool engineering and design work to Spillman after soliciting its leaders for political donations.
Storage space regulation loosened
In other business Wednesday, council voted 5-1 to eliminate a zoning requirement that apartment buildings offer 35 square feet of storage space outside of a given dwelling unit, such as in the basement.
Landlords of apartments under 700 square feet will now have to offer 16 square feet of additional storage space, and units 700 square feet or over will require no additional storage space.
City Center Investment Corp. requested the zoning change. It has successfully sought zoning relief for the nine apartment buildings it’s developed downtown over the past six years, but attorney Dennis McCarthy argued the process is costly and creates a layer of uncertainty for developers.
McCarthy said extra storage space is an amenity, and that the market should dictate whether or not developers offer it. No other city in Pennsylvania except for Reading regulates accessory storage space, he said, and Reading’s is restricted to highrises.
Councilman Courtney Robinson, the lone council member to vote against the change, said he fears other unnamed developers will exploit the loosened requirement. He cited a study claiming Allentown has the highest rent-to-income ratio in the nation, and said people renting 700-square-foot apartments here are often struggling to get by.
“This bill is not in the best interest of our residents,” he said.