One option for the nearly vacant Tarpon Springs Health Care Center might be to put it in the voters' hands.
By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published March 19, 2004
TARPON SPRINGS - City officials aren't talking referendum yet, but they say residents could soon be asked to sign off on yet another city land deal.
A little more than a week after residents voted to support the sale of several Helen Ellis Memorial Hospital properties, Tarpon Springs officials say they are considering selling or leasing the Tarpon Springs Health Care Center at 501 S Walton Ave.
"The question is do we find another nursing home tenant?" said City Attorney John Hubbard. "Or do we find a tenant that will make a different use of the property? Or do we sell it?"
Either way, city officials say they expect the nursing home's 5-acre plot to provide substantial revenue for the city in the future. The nursing home property is worth more than $2-million, according to a 2003 Pinellas County Property Appraiser estimate.
"We're trying to look at what all of the alternatives are so that the citizens can get value from the property," said city business services specialist Charlie Attardo.
Tarpon Health Care Center has been virtually empty for weeks. The nursing home facility's lease on the city-owned property will end on July 1. A handful of the nursing home's staff helped moved the last of the patients to other health care facilities earlier this month.
Attardo said that at least one nursing home company has expressed interest in leasing the property. But the city also is considering selling the property instead of leasing it, Attardo said.
Whatever the city decides to do, residents will likely have a say in the property's future. Last year voters reaffirmed a charter referendum stipulating that city-owned land can only be sold with the approval of Tarpon Springs residents. The city charter also requires a referendum when city-owned land is leased for more than five years.
The nursing home's history goes back to 1979, when a special nonprofit corporation was set up to borrow $2.2-million in tax-free bonds to build the facility. Tax laws at the time required that the city become the owner of the nursing home when the bond debt was paid off.
The nursing home's former operator, Beverly Enterprises, signed a 9-year lease with the city in 1995. The country's largest nursing home chain at one time had plans to purchase the 120-bed facility from the city. But following a series of costly lawsuits filed against Beverly, the company agreed to sell 49 of its Florida nursing homes in July 2001 to a group callled NMC of Florida for $165-million.
Since then, city officials say they have had difficulty communicating with the nursing home's most recent operator, Sea Crest Health Care Management. In October 2001, Beverly sent the city a letter saying it intended to sell its Tarpon Springs facility to Sea Crest Health. Hubbard said he contacted Sea Crest Health Care president Patrick Duplantis about the Tarpon Springs property about a year later. They discussed the future of the facility's lease with the city but then, Hubbard said, Sea Crest did not contact the city for another two years.
With 6,000 beds under its management, Sea Crest is Florida's largest nursing home operator. Like many large-scale nursing home companies in recent years, Sea Crest has weathered plenty of legal storms. Last year, Sea Crest Health was named one of several defendants in a lawsuit brought by two men who claimed that a Hernando County nursing home affiliated with the company was negligent in its care of their mother.
Several calls to Duplantis at Sea Crest Health's Tampa office were not returned this week.
City building officials are expected to inspect the property before the city makes a decision on whether to sell or lease the property.
