Pittsburgh City Council delays action on public-safety training center as controversy simmers

Pittsburgh City Council delayed action Wednesday on a controversial plan to convert a former Veterans Affairs hospital to a public safety training center — setting council up to revisit the debate after it returns from its August recess.

Council voted to hold off for seven weeks on approving a contract related to the proposal, first made during the administration of former Mayor Bill Peduto.

“In many ways, we really need … to go back to the drawing board and look at what the potential options are that we have for the use of that land,” said Councilor Khari Mosley during the 20-minute discussion. “Even though this is eight years into this, in some ways we can look at this as early in the process.”

The Peduto administration acquired the land from the federal government after the hospital closed, with plans to use it as a state-of-the-art training facility. In that vision, the center would include a “Hogan’s Alley” — a simulated urban environment for police to train in — as well as fitness equipment, shooting ranges, and other training facilities.

Those plans sparked alarms among some progressive activists in the wake of a bitter national dispute over “Cop City,” a controversial training facility in Atlanta.

Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration has said it has a different vision for the site, one that would offer training for all the city’s first responders.

Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak told council earlier this month that cop city concerns “mostly reflect the previous vision for the site, which did include a relocation of police headquarters, the special deployment division [and] the Zone 5 police station … alongside training facilities. All of those uses have been removed from this proposal, in part to address those concerns.”

Pawlak said the administration’s new proposal “would replace existing training assets that we have elsewhere in the city,” including a defunct tower once used by city firefighters.

Pawlak also warned that under the terms of the city’s acquisition of the land, the site had to be used for public-safety purposes. And he said the city was required to have a master plan for the site completed by next June. If it didn’t, he said, the federal government could take back the property — and potentially use it for immigration-related purposes.

On Wednesday, however, council members still had doubts.

The vote before them Wednesday involved a comparatively modest sum: a $1.8 million contract with Henningson Durham & Richardson to perform a master plan for the site, complete with a review of underground utilities. But it was clear that broader concerns were also just below the surface.

“This just seems so entirely unnecessary,” said Councilor Barb Warwick. “And the idea of this larger-scale training facility — whether it be for the police, for fire, or for EMS — at this point in time just seems sort of pie in the sky.

“We have pools that need to be fixed. We have rec centers that need to be fixed,” she added.

Warwick said that fears of the Trump administration using the site for immigration detention sounded like an “excuse” because the administration had already shown an ability to ramp up detention facilities elsewhere.

Councilor Deb Gross said the original deal struck by Peduto left council facing a dilemma. Officials might want to use the site for other purposes entirely, she said, such as recreation or affordable housing.

“How do we not lose the site and have to give it back to the federal government, but then … how to do what Pittsburghers want and are asking us to do within the constraints of that contract?” she asked. “Is there still an opportunity to say … ‘Actually, we changed our mind and we’d like to do housing here?’ We don’t have the answer to that right now.”

Short of a sweeping change to plans for the site, councilors ruminated over the possibility that a public-safety center could be both opened up to the community, and used to support more community-based responses. The city has sought to include social-support professionals on some police calls, and it has long espoused better police-community relations.

“I do support our police officers, and I do think we need them,” said Councilor Theresa Kail-Smith. “And I do think we need to do things in combination to get people help.”

But with such broad questions unanswered, council members voted to delay action on the contract until after they return from their summer recess.

Anthony Coghill, who chairs council’s public safety committee and has often been a vocal supporter of more robust policing, was absent for the discussion Wednesday. But some public-safety union leaders said a new facility would help their members.

“We just don’t have enough classroom space to keep up with the training that we do,” Tim Leech, vice president of the city’s firefighter union, told WESA.

Firefighters currently use Allegheny County resources to train, he said, and “a new, updated training facility would be great. If we had adequate facilities that we could use like that, we wouldn’t need to take our training up to the county’s training facility.”

Jon Atkinson, president of Pittsburgh’s local paramedic and EMT union, agreed that EMTs could use updated training space. But he’s also concerned about where the city would find the money to provide that space, and whether it would come from other public-safety needs.

“The city’s got some budgetary issues, and I just don’t know how they would fund it,” he said. “Especially when you consider the more immediate needs of public safety, the fact that our fleet is in pretty rough shape right now.”

Many critics, meanwhile, appear to have few doubts that the proposal is a bad idea. Council’s move to delay the vote came after an hour-long public comment period, which was dominated by speakers who opposed the plan. Several said they had bad encounters with city police during the George Floyd-related protests of 2020, and they warned that the facility would instill a more militarist mindset among police.

“If we give military training to our police, they are more likely to act as military police,” said Daniel Dulaney of Shadyside.

Another speaker, Daniel Patel, decried the possibility of spending money on a police-training facility at a time when community needs such as public transit and social-safety-net programs such as food stamps were being threatened by cuts at other levels of government. When he hears the plan discussed, he said, “My heart tells me that this American dystopia is alive in my city, too.”

Other police reformers have yet to weigh in, in part because of uncertainty about what Gainey — long a standard-bearer for reform efforts — has in mind.

Brandi Fisher, executive director of the Alliance for Police Accountability, said her organization was initially against the plan back when it started under Peduto. She said that confusion surrounds the current proposal, and that activists are scheduling a meeting with Pawlak to understand it better.

“It seems like things have changed depending on who has been in power, and that’s where the lack of clarity is coming from,” she said.