The City of Pittsburgh will allocate funding to ensure the recently renovated Burgwin Rec Center in Hazelwood can open this fall and host after-school programs for kids.
Council on Tuesday voted unanimously to take $200,000 from the city’s Stop the Violence trust fund and use it to benefit social-services programming at the center.
The center, located on the border of Hazelwood and Glen Hazel, and its adjoining park have been a local nexus of youth programming for years. In 2023, council took $1 million from a cancelled transit project to pay for renovations there.
In recent months, however, community organizations that provide services at the center have struggled with thin budgets. Councilor Barb Warwick, who represents the neighborhoods, asked for the allocation to ensure the rec center would be able to open at all.
“I am very, very glad that the funding is there for after-school and summer programming at Bergwynn,” Warwick told WESA on Tuesday after the meeting. “Out-of-school-time care is critical. It’s critical for our kids, it’s critical for our families, and I’m excited that this ball is now rolling”
Warwick said renovations are nearly complete at the center, and she hopes the funds will be ready for the reopening as soon as the work is finished — ideally as close to the start of the school year as possible. The next step, she said, is for CitiParks to discuss with the Hazelwood community the best way to use the funds.
Discussions about the bill have taken on a tense tenor during the past several weeks. Councilors seemed at first skeptical of the proposal when Warwick introduced it in June. Several members raised questions about how other city recreation centers in similar situations should be funded.
Warwick held the bill and invited Hazelwood residents to speak at a council meeting about their hopes for the center. A number of people attended and stressed that funding services at the center would greatly benefit the neighborhood.
Last week, council gave its preliminary approval of the bill, but only after debating and eventually voting down a last-minute amendment put forward by Councilor Bobby Wilson of the city’s North Side. Wilson’s amendment would have expanded the bill to all recreation centers citywide.
At the meeting Tuesday, Councilor Bob Charland introduced a bill of his own that would allocate an equal amount of Stop the Violence money to McKinley Recreation Center. The bill would set aside $200,000 for that center, located in Beltzhoover and in Charland’s district. Charland said the community groups that run programs out of McKinley have had to cap participation in their programs recently due to funding constraints.
Charland voted against Warwick’s bill last week, citing concerns that it would be unfair to fund one center over others. On Tuesday, he changed his vote to a yes, while introducing his own bill.
“Ultimately, I’m gonna do the exact same play that Councilwoman Warwick did,” he said. “If that worked for her to fund her rec centers, then what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and I’m gonna introduce my own legislation here.”
Warwick said she was “very enthusiastic” about Charland’s bill to fund McKinley.
“I hope that this is a trend that we can start seeing citywide,” she said.
Both Warwick and Charland agreed that council should have a larger conversation about how to fund and support rec center programming across the city.
“I think that we need to really evaluate how we are providing this programming to everybody in the city,” Warwick said. “If you don’t have one of those rec centers in your neighborhood, you don’t get that service. We can’t fix it citywide overnight, but I am very, very glad that this conversation has started.”