The plan to create a regional youth detention center<\/a> stems from an ongoing shortage of space to house youth offenders across Pennsylvania.<\/p>\nThe new detention center is slated to be located at the site of Berks\u2019 former youth detention center. That facility on County Welfare Road in Bern Township closed its doors in 2012.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmazingly enough, all five counties passed the resolution with unanimous support,\u201d Barnhardt said. \u201cThat is pretty impressive.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are really excited to move forward,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 juvenile probation, finance and operations departments.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cCounties cannot always solve problems by themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Commissioner Michael Rivera said that the willingness of five counties to collaborate on this shows the importance of the facility.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not for young people committing petty crimes,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is for dangerous criminals that need to be taken off the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Commissioner Dante Santoni Jr. said officials will now turn their focus to advocating for state and federal financial assistance for the center.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are moving along great, but we still have a lot of work to do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fifth and final county has officially joined an effort initiated by Berks County officials to build a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,182,139,432],"class_list":["post-284446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}