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All Children's looks outside downtown
By JENNIFER GOLDBLATT
© St. Petersburg Times, NEW PORT RICHEY -- All Children's Hospital Specialty Care Clinic plans to leave New Port Richey's downtown, saying it would be too costly to expand. The hospital has not found a new location and has vowed to maintain the building and keep it in use until it finds a buyer. "We need to relocate," said Bill Horton, vice president of ambulatory care and professional services for All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. "It's significantly more expensive to build on this site and try to come up with the (space) comparable to other specialty care locations." The specialty care clinic, which offers 13 different services, occupies 14,000 square feet at 5640 Main St. in the heart of the city's downtown. Different offices within the clinic are open at different times, and about 25 people are working there at any given time. All Children's bought the former bank building in 1995 and moved the clinic there from the space it had occupied since 1982 on Trouble Creek Road. Since then, All Children's has opened four similar clinics throughout the state, each of which spans about 18,000 square feet. The clinic needs space to expand so it can offer the same services in Pasco that it does in other locations. The clinic also needs to accommodate the tremendous growth in admissions, which are expected to reach 16,500 this year, up 21 percent since 1998. "It's based on the success and the growth of this community that we're having to address this location issue," Horton said. It would cost from $800,000 to $1.2-million to expand and remodel the current facility, he added. That excludes the costs of trying to keep programs up and running while the work is being done. If the clinic expanded at its current location, it would be left with no growth possibilities for things such as physicians' offices or an ambulatory surgery facility. "We're trying to plan out five to 10 years in advance to meet those needs," Horton said. In a new location, the clinic would be able to provide the classes on parenting, safety and babysitting that it does at its other clinics. "Now, we're not providing the same standard of outreach programming in Pasco as we are in our other facilities," he said. The city is discussing building a parking facility and had talked to the hospital about how that facility could accommodate the clinic's need for parking. But that project, which the city staff says is needed to accommodate the rest of downtown's parking needs, is still in the early planning stages. The hospital said a lack of parking was not among the top reasons for its decision to move. Finding a new site and constructing a clinic would take anywhere from 18 months to two years, and the hospital has promised the city that it would maintain the downtown building until that time. The hospital also promised that after it moves and before it sells the building, it will find an interim use for the space, such as a community meeting facility. "We won't leave it a big vacant building; we won't go and leave a hole in downtown." The hospital is now searching for a 4- to 5-acre site that would have good access and visibility. The hospital has looked at a site in Longleaf, a 1,000-home community the Starkey family is building, as well as other sites in West Pasco. The clinic also provides space for the Sertoma Speech and Hearing Foundation in the building and is prepared to offer the foundation space in its new facility. City officials could not be reached for comment.
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From today's Pasco Times |
