Tony Luke’s wont be the only new inhabitant of Temple’s highly anticipated Morgan Hall.
Campus Safety Services has confirmed that it will be moving in to the 27-story residence hall facility along with upward of 1,275 students this fall. A new Temple Police location, similar in function to the substation on Polett Walk, will be located on the ground floor of the building on its Park Avenue side.
“When you’re looking at university housing, 1300 is a large facility, Temple Towers is a fairly large facility and now this,” Deputy Director of Campus Safety Services Charlie Leone said. “We’re going to have quite a number of students on that south end living, so we want to make sure we have people close by.”
The substation will house office space, a charging station for the famed T3 police scooter and extra officers to patrol the area. Morgan Hall will also use an estimated 80 to 100 security cameras to maintain a safe environment for students and community members alike.
Leone said he expects to hire about six officers to staff the facility and actively patrol Morgan Hall and the surrounding area. The construction of this substation is taken care of in construction costs, he said, so the biggest expense to CSS will be these new officers.
“The big cost is going to be the bodies,” he said. “You’re probably talking over $200,000 just for that.”
Leone added that there would be extra costs, possibly another $100,000, to staff the office.
Although the cost of new officers is high, Leone said with such a unique building, CSS wants to have its bases covered.
“It’s a big unknown, [Morgan Hall] is the first type of structure that we’ve been involved in,” Leone said. “What are our calls going to be like? How many service resources, how many service calls are we going to see in there? Things of that nature.”
The southwest end of campus has seen an influx of students in recent years with facilities like the Edge, Oxford Village and the Avenue North complex. Consequently, CSS has made a point of maintaining a consistent presence in areas heavily traveled by students, Leone said. The new residence hall, located on the east side of Broad Street, requires that presence to be extended.
“With this growing, we just wanted to make sure that, [we increase] not just the patrol presence, but have a fixture that students can come in to if they have questions,” Leone said. “It’s helpful to have somewhere to go.”
Morgan Hall is set to open its doors to students this fall.
Ali Watkins can be reached at allison.watkins@temple.edu.
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