Greensburg to close deteriorating hospital garage on Dec. 1

The decades-old deteriorating parking garage attached to Excela Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg soon will close and be demolished because it is too costly to maintain and repair, a city official said.

“It’s reached the end of its useful life,” Mayor Robert Bell said of the J. Edward Hutchinson Parking Garage, which is connected to the hospital by an enclosed walkway over Shearer Street. Deteriorated steel girders are visible at the front of the garage.

An engineering study revealed it would cost more than $2 million to perform the needed preventive maintenance, the mayor said. And that work only would extend the useful life of the garage for another three to five years, Bell added.

“We can’t justify that expenditure,” he said, noting the city spent $1 million a few years ago to make repairs at the garage. “You just don’t want to keep doing that.”

Greensburg will seek funding to demolish the 42-year-old garage, Bell said.

Closing the garage will mean the loss of revenue that the city received from parking fees and was used in a capital fund to purchase police vehicles and fire trucks, said Councilman Randall Finfrock, director of accounts and finance. The revenue from the parking garage was about $139,000 before the covid pandemic, Finfrock said.

The city made the decision to close the garage Dec. 1 in concert with Excela Health. The health system acknowledged in a statement the garage was reaching the end of its useful life and the cost would be prohibitive for doing the preventive maintenance and repairs.

The garage, built for 475 vehicles, opened in October 1979. It was intended to ease parking problems at the hospital.

The city’s parking authority issued bonds to raise money for the construction and that financing was coupled with a $738,000 public works grant.

Parking revenue from the garage was split between the city and hospital, an arrangement hammered out between Mayor Robert A. Bell, the current mayor’s father, and hospital officials, Finfrock said.

But the city’s portion of the money from the parking garage has declined from about $250,000 annually 10 years ago to about $139,000 annually before the covid pandemic, Finfrock said. The expansion of outpatient services at facilities outside the hospital, the addition of free parking spaces around the garage and changes in health care, where patients spend fewer days in the hospital, are among factors impacting the drop in revenue, Finfrock said.

“We have to replace that with another source of revenue,” Finfrock said.