Pittsburgh delays lease extension for police headquarters

Pittsburgh City Council tabled a proposal to extend the city’s lease for its police headquarters building after discovering that it still has one year left on its existing lease.

The mayor’s office proposed a six-year lease extension for the Western Avenue building on Pittsburgh’s North Side last month. That lease would have cost the city more than $1.3 million a year.

Maria Montaño, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ed Gainey, said the administration had assumed the existing lease was expiring at the end of the year because it was a 20-year lease negotiated in 2002. But city police did not move into that space until 2003, leaving another year on the lease, she said.

City officials had pitched the idea of ultimately moving police headquarters to a sprawling public safety training facility that was to be built in Lincoln-Lemington. That project has stalled as officials said they don’t have the funding for a project that likely would cost well over $100 million. Officials have said they need to reevaluate plans for that project.