Allentown City Council passes $134M bond measure to pay for new police, fire HQs

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Decades of Allentown taxpayers are set to help pay for new facilities for many city employees.

City Council on Wednesday approved borrowing up to $134 million in bonds for an expanded Allentown Police Department and a new Central Fire Station that also will house EMTs and the city’s Health Bureau.

Those two projects are projected to cost the city about $86 million; council already has set aside $9 million in federal coronavirus pandemic-relief funding for the new police station.

Administration officials are earmarking more than $36 million raised through bonds to pay for other capital projects the city has “not been able to work on for many, many years,” Allentown Finance Director Bina Patel said Wednesday.

That includes plans to build a new parks maintenance facility, repair Mack Pool and Canal Park Bridge, restore public works facilities, and redesign Fountain Park.

But those are “placeholder projects”; members have “the authority to change the projects” and put funding behind other initiatives, Patel said after Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach suggested city officials use some of the $100-million-plus raised through bonds to help the city’s homeless.

Overdue investment: Councilman

The nine-figure bond plan is like a mortgage to help the city pay for assets that will “impact future generations,” Councilman Santo Napoli said.

“These are buildings, these are projects, that are going to be around for the next 50 years,” he said.

Many of the capital projects are long-overdue, Napoli said.

“We have to start investing,” Napoli said. “The fact that we haven't is why we're having this conversation now. That fire station should have been replaced 10 years ago.”

Councilwoman Candida Affa said she worried the city would spend millions of dollars every year to keep its current police and fire stations running.

“If we don't do this now, I'm afraid we're going to piecemeal it year by year,” she said.

Allentown Fire Department Assistant Chief Matt Eharth said the outdated Central Fire Station is “an endless pit of money at this point, with Band-Aids and Band-Aids and Band-Aids.”

Operations at the station, which also houses the city’s emergency medical services, have outgrown its capacity, he said.

He said many fire vehicles and ambulances are parked off-site “because we have no place to go.”

'A lot of money'

Councilman Ed Zucal was hesitant to support the $134 million bond measure.

Zucal highlighted the administration’s financial projections: Allentown still must pay off about $90 million in principal and interest fees on several bonds issued since 2007, Patel said.

The city will pay down $8.3 million of that debt in 2025; its annual debt-service payment could peak at $15 million in 2036 if all projects listed in the new bond plan are pursued over the next few years, according to projections.

Zucal said he worries about the city’s ability to spend that much on bond payments in a decade without major tax increases.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said. “If we vote on this, we're going to kill the people. We are literally going to kill the city.”

Zucal tried to limit the bond proposal’s scope; he proposed the city only issue bonds to expand the police department and build a new fire/EMS station.

“This was meant for public safety to start with, and now we’ve got all these [other] projects,” he said.

But no other members backed Zucal’s measure before he joined them to unanimously pass the bond proposal.

A preliminary schedule shows Allentown borrowing $41 million in bonds in 2026, 2027 and 2028. Those bonds must be repaid by 2055.