Pittsburgh to continue leasing space from CCAC for public safety training facility

Pittsburgh City Council voted Tuesday to extend the city’s lease to use a Community College of Allegheny County-owned property as a public training facility until the city can build its own.

The measure will extend the city’s lease for a property on North Lincoln Avenue for an additional five years. The total cost will be just over $2 million.

During discussions last week, some council members expressed concern about spending money on a lease when the city is looking to build its own training facility at the 168-acre property that previously housed the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System in the city’s Lincoln-Lemington neighborhood.

Deputy Police Chief Thomas Stangrecki, who will take over as acting chief when Chief Scott Schubert retires at the end of the month, said he has no timetable for when the multiyear project will begin. Police need a place to train recruits and veteran officers until the site is ready, he said.

“My concern has been that we’re spending this money on leasing instead of purchasing and building and doing what we need to do for the public training facility,” Council President Theresa Kail-Smith said.

She said she wouldn’t create obstacles for police training, but wanted to ensure taxpayer money is spent responsibly. Kail-Smith questioned whether the training done at CCAC’s site couldn’t be conducted at a city-owned building or at another facility the city already leases, like the Steamfitters building the city leases for public safety in Duquesne Heights for about $3 million.

The CCAC location is used to train police recruits and for additional training programs with veteran officers, Stangrecki said. Police also use it for meeting space and a computer lab.

The city previously housed its police training academy in a city-owned building on Washington Boulevard, which officials have acknowledged is in poor condition.

The vote to extend the city’s lease with CCAC comes after City Council earlier this month voted to reallocate funds meant for the new public safety training facility to a project that will convert Penn Circle into a two-way street. Council members and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Jake Pawlak said they would replenish that funding for the new facility in the next budget year.

The project was not ready to move ahead this year, officials said, and the cash that was reallocated makes up just a portion of the more than $100 million needed to fund the training facility work.

“Hopefully, in that five years before we have to renew (the lease), we have that new facility built,” Councilman Anthony Coghill said.

City Councilman Ricky Burgess abstained from Tuesday’s vote because he is a CCAC employee. All other council members voted in support of extending the lease agreement.