The fifth and final county has officially joined an effort initiated by Berks County officials to build a regional youth detention center.
At a commissioners meeting Thursday, Berks Chief Operations Officer Kevin Barnhardt announced that Lehigh County officials this week unanimously approved a resolution to open and operate the Keystone Regional Youth Detention Center. It joins Berks, Dauphin, Delaware and Lackawanna counties.
The plan to create a regional youth detention center stems from an ongoing shortage of space to house youth offenders across Pennsylvania.
The new detention center is slated to be located at the site of Berks’ former youth detention center. That facility on County Welfare Road in Bern Township closed its doors in 2012.
To make reopening the detention center financially viable, Berks reached out to four surrounding counties each facing the same challenges finding space to detain youth offenders. All are now on board.
“Amazingly enough, all five counties passed the resolution with unanimous support,” Barnhardt said. “That is pretty impressive.”
He said that with the paperwork formalized, the plan is to put bids out in October for the renovations needed. The hope is for construction to begin in January, with a completion date of March 2028.
“We are really excited to move forward,” he said.
Barnhardt said work will now begin on creating a council to oversee the center. The panel will be composed of three representatives from each of the participating counties. Those representatives will be selected from the counties’ juvenile probation, finance and operations departments.
Commissioners Chairman Christian Leinbach commended all involved in helping to make the plan a reality. He said he hopes this becomes a model that could be emulated by other counties struggling to tackle difficult issues.
“Counties cannot always solve problems by themselves,” he said. “We could not have afforded to do this by ourselves and that was a true understanding of each of the partner counties who came together on this.”
Commissioner Michael Rivera said that the willingness of five counties to collaborate on this shows the importance of the facility.
“This is not for young people committing petty crimes,” he said. “This is for dangerous criminals that need to be taken off the streets.”
Commissioner Dante Santoni Jr. said officials will now turn their focus to advocating for state and federal financial assistance for the center.
“We are moving along great, but we still have a lot of work to do,” he said.