Pittsburgh police officers walk toward protesters as they block access to Carnegie Mellon University from Forbes Avenue in Oakland, Tuesday, July 15, 2025. Protesters showed up to protest President Donald Trump’s visit to an AI and energy summit led by Sen. David McCormick. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
City council delayed a vote to develop a public safety training campus amid criticism of the plan and a key contractor. Here’s what’s in the proposed plan and why some are concerned.
“Pittsburgh’s Public Source is an independent nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region. Sign up for our free newsletters.”
With a timeline crunch and contractual obligations, the City of Pittsburgh has decisions to make about a contentious “public safety training campus.” Amid concern about the project’s potential for encouraging police militarization, City Council deferred the project’s next steps until September.
The delayed vote would authorize a contract with development firm Henningson, Durham and Richardson Inc. [HDR] to craft a preliminary master plan for a 168-acre parcel in the Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhood that used to house a Veterans Affairs hospital. The city’s long-term goal is a comprehensive training facility for firefighters, emergency medical services and police
The contract would pay HDR up to $1.8 million over two years using funds already allocated from the city’s capital budget.
Council’s July decision to postpone the vote stems from:
- Concerns about HDR’s history, especially its gathering of intel about development critics
- The full cost — estimated at $84 million plus the master plan bill — and potential alternative uses for the funds and the land
- Whether the facility would be a “cop city” hive for aggressive policing.
“This idea that a city would build a facility to train its police in urban warfare is reprehensible. … So how do we prevent that is the question,” Councilor Deborah Gross said during an interview.
The project brought numerous residents out to council meetings to share their thoughts.
At a July 16 council meeting, one resident, Eliana Beigel, spoke about being pepper-sprayed during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, which changed her perspective on policing.
“What exactly are [the police] being trained in, and what facilities specifically do they plan to build and for what specific purpose?” Beigel asked. She expressed support for training for firefighters and medics. “What investments are actually being made for them?”
City administrators said the project’s scope has changed since 2021 plans, which drew comparisons to a contentious training facility in Atlanta that inspired the “cop city” moniker.
Jake Pawlak, deputy mayor and director of the city’s Office of Management and Budget, said it’s a smaller, more cost effective and focused project than the original, which had an estimated cost of $120 million. He said during a July 2 council meeting the city can express to the masterplan developer that fire and EMS training are the first priority for future construction.
“It has become more balanced in its distribution across the various first responder agencies, because we’re not looking also at police headquarters and things like that,” Pawlak said.
Pawlak said the city doesn’t intend to foster a militarized police force and it isn’t opposed to council putting more “guardrails” on legislation to ensure that.
Here are the facts, the stakes and alternatives before council as it takes an August recess ahead of the controversial vote.
The deed
The city took ownership of the site from the federal government in mid-2021, at essentially no cost.
The city, under contract with the General Services Administration, must use the former VA property for law enforcement and emergency management, according to the deed that transferred the property. The deed also stipulates that a master plan be presented to the state historic preservation office by June 2026 or the federal government could reclaim the land or seek payment, Pawlak said.
“We don’t know what we would be asked to pay,” Pawlak said.
The need
Robert Swartzwelder, president of the union representing Pittsburgh officers, said the city’s current police training facilities are outdated. Pittsburgh’s police use classrooms leased from the Community College of Allegheny County.
“It’s time to modernize Pittsburgh’s facilities,” he said.
Robust training, he said, reduces instances of violence and force. Having leadership from all three public safety departments in the same place could create better communication, he added.
Beth Pittinger, executive director of the Citizens Police Review Board, said a comprehensive facility would benefit the community and, in time, could become a regional asset if there were opportunities to train officials from other municipalities.
“This isn’t changing the skill sets that police are going to be trained in,” Pittinger said. “They’re going to either be trained in 10 different locations or in one.”
She also believes the site could be a great opportunity for both the city and the region in terms of community-engaged public safety education, such as CPR training.
“It would not be a secure, fenced-in facility that alienates anybody that goes by,” she said. “It’s part of supporting the community by treating our community helpers as professionals … and having the accessibility so that it’s almost a community-like center.”
City firefighters have to travel from the Washington Boulevard training academy to Allegheny County’s training space in Allison Park to practice controlled burns several times a year, said firefighters union Vice President Tim Leech.
The academy’s classroom space makes new recruit training and continued education for current firefighters cramped, he said. Updated facilities would benefit the firefighters and the public, he added.
“It would be better training, better morale. It would make things safer for the citizens, for the firefighters to have better training facilities,” Leech said. “It would contribute to the safety of the city.”
City Councilor Khari Mosley, whose district encompasses the proposed site, said in an interview before the contract was presented that he hopes a comprehensive facility could include social services as well.
The plan
The first phase of master planning is an assessment of the land and structure conditions, Pawlak said during a council meeting on July 2. It would not produce a conceptual plan of what the training campus would look like.
The firm chosen for the first round may, however, be retained for future phases of the plan, according to a request for proposals [RFP] that Pittsburgh’s Public Source acquired through a Right-to-Know Law request.
According to a summary presented to Council, the master plan would evaluate whether and how the property could house:
- Training classrooms for all public safety bureaus, including a conference center
- An emergency vehicle operations course
- An evidence warehouse
- A fire burn tower
- Indoor multipurpose training and wellness spaces, including indoor pool and locker rooms
- An indoor firing range
- A K-9 training facility
- Outdoor multipurpose training areas
- Salt and winter weather equipment storage
- Animal Care & Control administration
- Emergency vehicle storage and garage, including a Special Deployment Division satellite office
- EMS administration
- Fire/Emergency Management administration, including a backup 911 center
- A public safety warehouse.
The RFP also stipulates that the chosen development firm be present in three public forums and provide presentations addressing “security, noise, increased traffic, community impact, and incorporate surveys for feedback.”
It also states the developer must produce a five- to 20-year construction phasing strategy for the campus. The city estimates phase one will take 14 to 18 months from contract to final review, according to the RFP.
Pawlak said the city proposed funding in 2023 for planning, but it wasn’t approved by council. Reporting by TribLIVE since 2022 states some funding budgeted for the project was diverted to other public works projects, such as road repair.
“We weren’t able to begin the work in 2024 as we had hoped, and would have given us more lead time to hit the deadline,” Pawlak said.
The overall estimate and timeline will be more clear after the master plan, he added.
The firm
The city picked HDR, of Omaha, Nebraska, based on a request for qualifications [RFQ], which called for “firms with extensive public safety master institutional planning experience as well as experience managing multiple design, engineer and construction contracts from concept through construction.”
The city’s subsequent request for proposals notes that it may retain the contracted firm for future phases of the project’s development.
HDR has a portfolio of projects across the country ranging from public works, including the Fern Hollow Bridge, to universities and prisons. It also has projects overseas and has had contracts with the Department of Defense.
In 2023, HDR settled a class-action lawsuit that claimed the firm “wiretapped” residents who opposed the construction of a highway on a mountain sacred to the Native Americans around Phoenix.
Phoenix resident Carol Davis alleged that her communications in private Facebook groups were, “monitored, read, disclosed, intercepted in real time, and otherwise wiretapped and/or accessed in electronic storage by HDR” without her consent, according to the lawsuit complaint.
The company conducts surveillance through its STRATA team, designed to measure social and political risk of a project for its stakeholders through 24/7 social media listening, according to the firm’s website.
“Analyzing the social, political and regulatory climate, historical and cultural overview, key influencers and decision makers, and socioeconomics help our clients strategize and create informed decisions about how to move forward with projects,” HDR’s website states of its STRATA team.
The complaint said that HDR “infiltrated” two private community Facebook groups — one in which residents could discuss community concerns and another that was focused on protesting construction of the highway.
The complaint also claims the company generated various reports on public sentiment drawn from social media, and a map categorizing communities as “ethnic enclaves,” “barrios urbanos,” “scholars and patriots” and “American dreamers.”
HDR declined to comment for this story.
New realizations about HDR’s past and “social listening” methods could also bring contracting plans back to the drawing board, Olga George, the mayor’s press secretary, wrote in an email.
She said the city is grateful Gross flagged concerns about HDR’s surveillance services, adding that Mayor Ed Gainey opposes the social media monitoring techniques the firm is accused of employing.
“We were not aware of that service offering, did not request that type of service in our RFQ, and did not receive a proposal from HDR for that type of work in response to our RFQ,” George said “In light of her identifying this issue, we are reevaluating the other proposals we received.”
The fears
In 2023, Highland Park resident Sarah Wasilewski traveled to Atlanta to protest construction of a police training facility. She and other protesters were concerned about police militarization at the Georgia facility and how it could be weaponized against the public, as well as the environmental ramifications of the site being located in the Weelaunee Forest.
Wasilewski and two other Pittsburgh residents were charged with domestic terrorism and misdemeanor trespassing in connection to the protests. Cases against them are ongoing. The Atlanta training facility opened in April 2025.
“The larger, most terrifying part of this whole thing is that it’s criminalizing an ideology and a movement and saying that these people are literally terrorists,” Wasilewski said.
To Wasilewski, the idea of Pittsburgh having a similar project, is the “worst-case scenario.” However, she said the response and shared concern from City Council is already more positive than what she saw in Atlanta.
“I think that the momentum that we’re building already in Pittsburgh is great,” Wasilewski said. “If [they] want to make it a training facility, how can we make sure, at the very least, it’s not a militarized police training center?”
Pittsburgh’s 2021 project concept, outlined in the land application, included a public safety “training village.”
It also outlined storage for large-scale equipment “regularly used to barricade pedestrian areas during large-scale special events” and for natural disaster response, according to the land deed.
Neither of these uses appear in any current, official documents. Pawlak said special deployment and police headquarters have also been removed from the new iteration of the project’s concept.
Miracle Jones, director of policy and advocacy at the social justice group 1Hood Media, said the removal of the training village was a step in the right direction. She said public safety needs to be reinvisioned beyond policing.
“We believe that our community should not be over-policed,” Jones said. “We believe our community needs support and resources in order to live and drive until the whole aspect of policing is fundamentally changed.”
Fawn Walker-Montgomery, CEO of Take Action Advocacy Group, a grassroots social justice organization, said she is especially concerned about the project being in a predominantly Black neighborhood, given the history of racial violence perpetrated by police. Around 85% of residents of Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar are Black.
“They get training all the time and it hasn’t stopped them from killing us or harming us,” she said. “It just seems like a waste, it seems fiscally irresponsible.”
Another concern: What would happen if the city didn’t pursue the training facility, and the federal government took the property back?
During the July 2 council meeting, Pawlak expressed concerns about the federal government’s ability to reclaim the property for Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] purposes.
“We do know that … this administration in particular has been keen to gain site control of property outside of Washington,” he said.
During a later interview, he said there was no official indication that the federal government would use the land for ICE detention.
Walker-Montgomery, like other activists, is not convinced the threat of losing the land is a reasonable excuse to push the project forward. “If they [federal government] take it back, then they take it back.”
Councilor Anthony Coghill said he is hesitant to spend $1.8 million on a master plan, but is concerned about losing domain over the property.
“There’s no better area, no better space for the City of Pittsburgh than this space for such training facilities,” Coghill said.
The alternatives
In 2006 and 2012, the Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] identified the VA site as an underutilized federal property that could be suitable for assisting homeless populations, according to Federal Register archives. Gross said the city could have stipulated other land uses in the contract, such as housing.
She’s doubtful, however, the General Services Administration would allow a change of use now. She said her priority is understanding the boundaries of the contract language and if it can include public safety that isn’t law enforcement.
“We’re having more emergencies in the city … Recently, I had a landslide in my district,” Gross said. “Cities everywhere need to maybe think about what emergency response capacity have we always had and does that need to change and … what additional assets or skill sets do we need?”
Walker-Montgomery said the conversations around the future of the site show how funding for productive community reinvestment isn’t prioritized. The land and money, she said, should be used to address health and housing disparities.
“Public safety could mean a whole bunch of different things, especially from a perspective of leading a city government,” said Walker-Montgomery. “Public safety doesn’t always mean police.”
Jones favors more education, housing, social services and investment in community resources. “All of these things work in tandem with each other.”
The next steps toward compromise, Jones said, include continued and diverse conversation about violence reduction, surveillance and overpolicing between the city and the public.
“We want to make sure that at the end of the day, all of our community members are able to be safe, are able to be free from community violence and state violence,” Jones said.
Ember Duke, a Pittsburgh’s Public Source editorial intern, is a recent graduate of Duquesne University and one of 10 Pittsburgh Media Partnership summer interns. She can be reached at ember@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.