PATERSON — The estimated cost of Mayor Andre Sayegh’s planned public safety dispatch center in a long-vacant warehouse on Pennsylvania Avenue has jumped over the past three years from $6 million to $15 million.
The City Council on Dec. 30 approved a $10 million construction contract for what Business Administrator Kathleen Long said would be the first phase of the work. Long said the second phase contract for the job likely would exceed $5 million.
That $15 million total price tag looms in jarring contrast to Sayegh’s previous assertions that the project would cost $6 million. In fact, the mayor in September 2022 held a ground-breaking ceremony at the warehouse calling the $6 million emergency dispatch center a victory for Paterson residents.
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Officials told Paterson Press that the 2022 project soon came to a halt — with no announcements from City Hall — when they learned the building needed far more work than originally believed. Instead of renovations, the city decided the entire inside of the building needed to be reconstructed.
Sayegh on Thursday did not respond to a message seeking his explanation for the skyrocketing expense.
Warehouse has been costly boondoggle
Even before 2022, the warehouse at 163-177 Pennsylvania Avenue had become a costly boondoggle for city government.
Between 2015 and 2020, Paterson officials had invested millions of public dollars to convert the building into a hub for start-up catering businesses. Sayegh, then a councilman, had been one of the biggest advocates for the initiative.
The renovations to create what Sayegh called food incubator program ran into funding shortages, design changes, and cost overruns. In 2020, Sayegh gave up on the commercial kitchen concept and decided to turn the building into a public safety dispatch center, one that would consolidate emergency communications for the police, fire, and public works departments.
During the Dec. 30 vote on the construction contract, City Council members didn’t ask any questions about the rising cost of the project.
Not using union labor
Instead, the governing body focused on why the Sayegh administration decided not to include in the contract the requirements of Paterson’s new union-friendly Project Labor Agreement (PLA). That municipal ordinance says 20% of the labor on city-funded construction costing more than $5 million should be performed by union apprentices with a focus on Paterson residents.
Long told the council that she decided not to include the PLA provisions to minimize costs and ensure Paterson had enough money to start construction. Long noted that the labor law allowed City Hall to exempt some projects from its requirements for financial reasons.
Council members said they were not satisfied with that explanation and mentioned the possibility of delaying the contract approval. But Long pointed out to the governing body that Paterson was using $9.4 million of its $64 million in American Rescue Plan COVID-relief funding — money that had to allocated by Dec. 31 or Paterson would lose it.
Eventually, only Councilman Al Abdelaziz voted against the $10 million contract, saying he was standing with his “union brothers and sisters” on the issue.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Cost of new Paterson NJ dispatch center balloons