Allentown officials alter terms of police station's sale to parking authority

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Allentown could get more than expected from the sale of one of its police stations, after officials adjusted a potential deal.

Allentown Parking Authority is set to buy the city’s police substation at the northwest corner of 10th and Hamilton streets and bundle it with its adjacent lot in a sale to a developer.

The city and parking authority are due to share proceeds of any sale, with the city in line to make a healthy profit on its $750,000 investment from March 2010.

This spring, the parking authority agreed to give the city the first $1.5 million from the properties’ sale, with both to evenly split any revenue above that.

But Allentown City Council on Dec. 18 approved a measure that changes the allocation from any sale.

The city now is set to get 55% of the final sale price, with the parking authority to bank 45%, according to Council Vice President Santo Napoli.

'More valuable'

The APA’s lot in the 1000 block of Hamilton Street is “more valuable” than the one that houses the Allentown Police Department’s substation, Napoli said.

But the agency’s board decided to accept a smaller percentage than the city “in the spirit of cooperation,” he said.

Allentown stood to get $2.75 million from a $4 million sale under the previous allocation setup, but a sale at that figure now would generate $2.2 million for the city.

The city stands to get a smaller portion of the final sales price, but that price could be much higher after officials removed the requirement for parking on the property.

Mandating parking would have “forc[ed] whoever takes that property to spend … between $2.5 million and $3 million just to add parking,” Napoli said Dec. 18.

“Underground parking is very expensive,” he said, adding underground parking spaces at the nearby STRATA Symphony apartment complex cost up to $60,000 per space.

Removing the parking requirement could open up the properties to more bidders because companies “can actually do development on the whole lot,” Mayor Matt Tuerk said, potentially driving up the final sale price.

And it “adds to what we want to see out of our downtown developments: more space dedicated to meeting the needs of residents and … less dedicated to extraneous parking.”

Parking 'more than adequate'

The parking authority included a parking requirement in its initial agreement of sale with the city because parking officials thought “we needed to maintain parking in that neighborhood,” Napoli said.

But the agency’s recent takeover of the parking deck at 940 W. Linden St. “changed” that, he said.

“Now, the capacity for parking in that neighborhood to service new development is more than adequate,” Napoli said.

He said the deck has about 1,100 spaces and is only a few hundred feet from the police substation.

The parking authority plans to use some of the money it gets from the sale to buy surface parking lots in some of the city’s “densest neighborhoods,” he said.

Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach joined Councilwoman Natalie Santos in voting against the changes. Gerlach has voted against the property sale at each opportunity and repeatedly called for the property to be turned into affordable or workforce housing.

“I hope I’m wrong; I hope I regret this vote,” Gerlach said Dec. 18. “It’s going to be probably a developer that’s already around, and he’ll do his thing — he’ll put the fancy restaurants on the bottom, he’ll put his luxury housing up top and everyone will move on.

“I hope I’m wrong.”