Berks County Moves to Buy 600 Penn Tower, Eyes $30M Bond

The Berks County Board of Commissioners met Thursday, August 27, 2026, and authorized the county to sign an agreement to buy the office tower at 600 Penn Street in Reading, and took a first step toward borrowing up to $30 million to ready the regional youth detention center. The board approved its agenda as a single block, the way it runs every meeting.

The county moves to buy 600 Penn Street

Resolution 263.2026 authorizes the county to sign an "Agreement of Sale" with 600 Penn Street, LP, for the property at 600 Penn Street in Reading, subject to final review and approval by the county solicitor's office.

That is the purchase step in a move the county has been building toward for months. Berks signed a $7.235 million letter of intent this summer to buy the former Wells Fargo tower as swing space while the aging courthouse is repaired; the background is in our report on the 600 Penn Street purchase. The resolution does not restate a price, and the deal still has to clear the solicitor's review, so the final sale terms are not yet public. Last week the board hired an architecture firm for $82,675, as we covered in our Aug. 20 recap, to plan which offices leave the courthouse and where they land.

A first step toward $30 million in youth-detention bonds

Resolution 259.2026 is a reimbursement resolution tied to the Regional Youth Detention Center Project. The agenda states the county "intends to issue up to $30,000,000 in General Obligation Bonds to finance capital improvements at the Regional Youth Detention Center and cover bond issuance costs."

A reimbursement resolution is a preliminary step, not the borrowing itself. Under federal tax rules, a government that plans to pay for a project now and pay itself back later from bond proceeds has to declare that intent first. Passing it preserves the county's option to reimburse itself, out of a future bond sale, for money it spends on the project in the meantime. General obligation bonds are debt backed by the county's full taxing power, and the actual bond sale, with its amount and terms, would come later in a separate action.

The project is the former county juvenile detention center in Bern Township that Berks is reopening as a five-county regional facility. The board approved the county's part of that agreement on July 23, which we covered in our youth detention center recap. This resolution is the first public sign of how much the county may borrow to ready the building: up to $30 million, a figure that also covers the cost of issuing the bonds.

The rest of the money

Resolution 253.2026 authorized $221,064 in budget transfers and $16,489 in new appropriations, per a listing dated August 21. The larger pieces move $185,457 plus $20,607 within the county's Youth Shelter accounts to pay for emergency shelter services for children in county care, and spend $16,489 from the general fund to install a camera system for the adult and juvenile probation offices.

The contract list, dated August 24, carried the biggest dollar items:

• Up to $644,246.47 in county money to repave the Berks County Jail on County Welfare Road in Leesport, plus up to $39,589 to run a natural gas line to the same site.
• Up to $236,846.91 in county-funded engineering and construction-management work to remove the Schaeffer's Ford Bridge No. 49B.
• Up to $498,720 in state grant money to continue rewriting the Children and Youth Services case-management system.
• An added $125,000 in county money for Penn State to keep running the small-business piece of the IMAGINE Berks economic-development plan, plus $20,000 in federal money for a PA CareerLink Day.
• A new Berks Heim medical-director agreement at up to $2,400 a month, and a five-year legal-research subscription capped at $19,879.96.

The board also passed a run of routine resolutions: hiring a court law clerk at $65,500 a year, four items executing the annual juvenile probation services grant, a letter urging municipalities to join the IMAGINE Berks planning process, a letter supporting the name "Berky Dell Brook" for a Washington Township stream, a purchasing-council appointment, a state homeland-security grant agreement for the Department of Emergency Services, a lease-termination tied to the Colebrookdale rail line, and a field-maintenance agreement for the county's youth recreational fields.

How the vote worked

Berks commissioners approve their agenda as a single block rather than voting on each resolution one by one. The meeting video runs the meeting in order: the call to order, the agenda items read, the agenda approved, reports from the Treasurer and Controller, commissioners' comments, and a public-comment period. The county had not posted written minutes of the August 27 meeting at publication, and we will update this recap if they show any change.

The next commissioners' board meeting is Thursday, September 3, at 10 a.m. at the Berks County Services Center, 633 Court Street, Reading. For how these meetings run and how to speak at one, see our guide, and for what the county controls versus the state and your township, see how Berks County government works.