The city of Pittsburgh has acquired ownership of the former Veterans Affairs hospital campus in Lincoln-Lemington, officials said Monday.
The city’s plans for the facility, which is located in the 7000 block of Highland Drive, include creating a regional public safety training center and introducing new stormwater management solutions to the Washington Boulevard corridor.
In moving public safety operations from locations around the city to the new site, officials said, the city will save millions of taxpayer dollars on leases of private properties. The move will also place some city-owned properties and land parcels back onto tax rolls.
The city acquired the 168-acre site from the federal government for free, officials said.
According to officials, the city plans to use the site as a state-of-the-art Public Safety Training Academy, a Public Safety Department and Emergency Management headquarters, a home for police K-9 and mounted units, storage of emergency response and winter weather response vehicles and equipment and for other uses.
Officials said the city will opt out of leases for Police Headquarters on Western Avenue in Chateau and the Police Training Academy on Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West due to the acquisition and will also move the Department of Public Works Heavy Equipment Division from its home along the Allegheny River in the Strip District and the Emergency Medical Services headquarters on Filbert Street in Shadyside to the facility.
The city plans to sell the Strip District and Shadyside properties.
Existing Public Safety facilities on Washington Boulevard will also be relocated to the new site to make way for stormwater remediation efforts in the flood-prone corridor. City officials have not yet offered details on what those remediation efforts will entail.
The boulevard was the scene of several drownings in 2011 after cars along the road became trapped in flash-flood waters.
There are however no plans to relocate the Zone 5 police station, which is currently on Washington Boulevard, according to a city spokesperson.
Officials also said renovations to the new facility will be net-zero, meaning they will produce as much energy as they consume, in accordance with city building requirements Mayor Bill Peduto’s administration introduced in 2019.
“This site provides us with a historic opportunity that we cannot let pass us by,” Mr. Peduto said in a news release. “We can advance sustainable green development in the city, provide a solution to decades of intractable flood mitigation challenges in the area, offer the best in life-saving training to personnel from around the region, and expand the City’s tax base.”
The VA opened the facility in 1953 as a neuropsychiatry center in order to treat World War II veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The site was vacated in 2013, and the VA moved its medical services to the University Drive campus in Oakland and the H. John Heinz III Medical Center facility in O’Hara.
The VA announced plans to dispose of the site in 2017, but the city of Pittsburgh instead submitted plans to the General Services Administration in 2018 to take it over via “public benefit conveyance,” which permits the federal government to lease or transfer ownership of surplus property.
Federal government agencies approved the site’s use by the city as a public safety complex and signed a memorandum of understanding on transferring the property earlier this year, officials said.
First Published: June 21, 2021, 6:32 p.m.
Updated: June 22, 2021, 11:54 a.m.
