9.24.09
OhioHealth paving way for Riverside growth
Business First of Columbus - by Carrie Ghose
Expansion around the Riverside Methodist Hospital campus could top $150 million and create 200 jobs over the next several years, once OhioHealth Corp. ends the construction hold it’s had in place because of the recession, officials have told Columbus City Council.

The city Department of Development has proposed a 30-year tax-increment finance district for road, sewer and infrastructure improvements in a region encompassing Riverside’s campus along Olentangy River Road, the McConnell Heart Health Center to the north, the Whetstone office complex across Olentangy and a small commercial district with other property owners south of the Route 315 hospital curve.

“We’ve talked about lots of different improvements and additions,” said Peter Fleming, OhioHealth vice president of real estate and construction. “We don’t have any specific plans right now. The economy has slowed down the type of improvements that we are doing.”

While OhioHealth wouldn’t own or build on every parcel in the TIF, he said, “Its use is and will be eventually driven by Riverside.”

Andrew Ginther, City Council’s development chairman, said city officials want to be strategic about using tax abatement powers to create higher paying jobs, and OhioHealth positions start in the $40,000 range with opportunity for growth.

Combined with expansions at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Ohio State University Medical Center and Mount Carmel Health System, he said, “It’s really a way for Central Ohio to lead the way for medical and health services.”

Corporate officials later this fall go through the annual approval process for all capital requests for the fiscal year that starts in July 2010. Plans discussed but not yet approved, Fleming said, include an eventual cancer center attached to the main hospital, relocating and expanding the Kobacker House inpatient hospice center to the woods behind McConnell, and building medical offices on that site and the Whetstone property.

The site near the proposed hospice would have room for a 60,000-square-foot office building and Whetstone would have space for a 70,000-square-foot building if the five vacant buildings there now were demolished.

“Doctors want to be close to the campus because it makes it convenient and time-effective to get back and forth to the hospital,” Fleming said.

The offices could be homes for practices OhioHealth has acquired in the past year or independent physicians, he said.

If construction hits the “conservative” $150 million estimate, OhioHealth would pay up front for an estimated $13.5 million worth of roads, utilities, landscaping and other improvements, then reap the increased property taxes collected from the improved properties. Columbus City Schools would still be paid as if there were no tax abatement. The abatement would, obviously, not apply to tax-exempt property built by the nonprofit, but there are taxable elements to several OhioHealth buildings, Fleming said.

The improvements also would include improving Thomas Lane and entrances and exits for Route 315, already going through a two-year overhaul in the stretch south of the hospital.

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