Bankrupt Chester City is getting nearly $100 million in state and private funding
Chester Mayor Stefan Roots said he wants Chester, home of Widener University, to be a "college town."
Approaching the fourth anniversary of its rare and historic bankruptcy, the City of Chester is about to get $97.1 million in public and private investments, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Thursday.
“I might just be the happiest mayor in America,” said Chester Mayor Stefan Roots, among those who joined Shapiro for the announcement in Delaware County’s only city.
Shapiro, noting that the resolution of the protracted and often acrimonious bankruptcy “would take far longer than I’d like,” said “the time to invest in Chester is now.”
Roots said the money would go toward beautifying neighborhoods and dealing with blighted properties in the city of 33,000. “We’re going to be repairing homes. ... We’re going to be improving roads and sidewalks,” he said.
The majority of the funding, $52.6 million, will go to “revamp and redesign” a section of Route 291, the old “Industrial Highway,” which separates the riverfront from the city neighborhoods. The bulk of that money would come PennDot and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Council.
The highway has long been a serious safety hazard for motorists and people who live along it, Roots said in an interview after the event.
PennDot also would be putting up $7.3 million for new sidewalks and walkways to Widener University, at the north end of town, in an effort to integrate the campus with the rest of the city.
“How do you be a city with a college, and not be a college town?” Roots said.
He said major efforts would be made to spruce up the Avenue of the States, which is a thoroughfare from City Hall to the campus about 10 blocks away.
The state and the Philadelphia Union soccer team are putting up $27.5 million to build “new outdoor fields, a 100,000-square-foot fieldhouse, indoor courts, academy space, and a performance center to expand youth programs and support school and community sports” at the riverfront Sportsplex in the city’s West End.
Shapiro said that Chester was now was “enterprise zone,” a Department of Community and Economic Development program in which tax breaks and grant money would be made available to investors.
The department is overseeing the city’s bankruptcy process, which began in fall 2022, in part due to several years of missed pension payments.
But the city’s financial distress has been about 70 years in the making, as it has struggled to pay bills with loss of businesses and its once-formidable industrial base. Among its prime sources of revenue today are an incinerator and a casino.
Among the nation’s more than 35,000 municipalities, only about 30 have filed for bankruptcy.
Neither Shapiro nor Roots made any mention of the bankruptcy beyond the governor’s opening comments.
State-appointed bankruptcy receiver Vijay Kapoor said in a statement, “We are very grateful for the commonwealth’s and the private sector’s investment in the City of Chester’s future.”
