Field Of Dreams Part Duex
"'The Sacking of Rome' with Monkeys" by Mark Fredrickson.
During 2014, Metro Health System presented a proposal to our civic leadership to invest $100,000,000 in Lakewood Hospital over a 10-year period. Our civic leadership made a decision to reject that proposal. How the decision was made to reject a proposal that would have kept Lakewood Hospital open still remains a mystery to many of us. In fact, the proposal from Metro Health System would have been kept a buried secret, hidden from the voters, but for the diligent efforts of local citizens who cared enough about Lakewood Hospital to start digging.
If you drive along Belle Avenue, sadly, you will see that Lakewood Hospital is now closed. Our civic leaders tell us that it is closed for good, never to reopen as a local community hospital. We are left with an empty hospital building.
Perhaps worse, we are left with civic leadership that didn’t have the knowledge, experience or interest to maintain the most valuable asset in our community. Metro Health System would not have proposed a $100,000,000 investment in Lakewood Hospital, if it wasn’t a valuable asset. Each year Lakewood Hospital generated more than $100,000,000 in gross revenues. It was the single largest economic driver in Lakewood in terms of dollars generated and people employed.
Others have eloquently spoken of the value of Lakewood Hospital to tone-deaf ears at City Hall and Council; my observations here are much more mundane. I’m just going to talk about it in terms of cold hard cash. Our civic leadership has no credible plan capable of replacing the economic engine that they have intentionally shut down. Over the balance of its now-canceled leased, Lakewood Hospital would have generated more than a billion dollars of economic impact. This is a conservative estimate that only assumes the continued operation of the hospital through the current lease period and not after 2026.
Did our civic leaders understand that they were shutting down a billion dollars’ worth of economic flow when they rejected the Metro Health System proposal? It seems not. If you were selling your house, you would have it appraised before putting it on the market. If our civic leaders had the operations or assets of Lakewood Hospital appraised by independent professionals, those appraisals have never been made public. If they didn’t have such a valuable asset appraised, then shame on them.
Our civic leadership has no plan to replace the economic engine that they have just shut down. Because, if they had had a plan, they’d understand that they would need to replace an institution capable of generating $100,000,000 on an annual basis. What have they been talking about? Freeing up the former hospital lots and organizing a community fund. If that’s the plan, it’s a plan to paper-over an economic black hole.
What was once the most economically productive real estate in the city is now probably the least productive. In order to recover what was lost, each acre of the former hospital lot would have to generate about $200,000,000 to be equivalent to the lost economic impact of Lakewood Hospital through 2026. That’s being generous, because it excludes the economic benefits of the hospital on into the future.
Now let’s think about the proposed community fund and how much a difference that would make. As I understand it, our civic leaders are planning to create a community fund on the order of $50,000,000. Assuming that is successful, well, it would still take $195,000,000 per acre to achieve the degree of economic impact provided by Lakewood Hospital and now lost.
Are there any plans at City Hall to replace this loss with a new major employer? I hope so, but probably doubtful at best. I’ll put down my calculator now. Our civic masterminds have engineered an economic black hole for us. Thanks.