Mayor D. C. Reeves is asking for help shaping the vision of the future for the Baptist Hospital Legacy Campus. At his presser this morning, the mayor talked about the vision being critical in securing state funding to help with the demolition of the old hospital in the West Moreno District.
On Thursday, Dec. 7, he is bringing in two people to facilitate discussions about the future of the property:
James Lima, JLP Development. James was hired by Baptist to do a lot of the visioning work in recent years and bring a wealth of experience and knowledge about this particular site, what the surrounding community has to say about the project and tons of context. Before we started discussing the future, I thought it was important as a community to lay out where we stand and what we know today. Baptist is partnering with the city to bring James in to discuss his findings, reports and thoughts on the project.
Gerry Bearousse, Bayou District Foundation. Gerry developed the Bayou District Foundation in New Orleans, an impressive housing/education/services community built on the site of a former public housing project. The results over 15 years are remarkable. I had a chance to tour the site and Gerry is familiar with our project. He will discuss what a purpose-built community is and its benefits; more than 120 communities have come to visit their project. He will discuss what they have done at the Bayou District Foundation in New Orleans and how he thinks that model can be applied here at the Baptist Hospital Campus. (Here is the link to learn more about the Bayou District Foundation: (https://bayoudistrictfoundation.com/)
Both will present beginning at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, December 7 at Bayview Community Center. RSVP is required to ensure space. Please contact my assistant Alex Smith at AlexSmith@cityofpensacola.com with an RSVP and any questions you may have.
This project is too important to be left in the hands of Mayor Reeves and Deputy “Mayor” Alex – The Hand of the Mayor – so eager to demolish everything. (Alex Smith one of Mayor Reeves two former campaign managers is widely addressed as “Mayor Alex.” The City Council is spending more than $125,000 a year to create a job for Smith.) It should be a community effort. The City Council should appoint a commission – each council member appointing two members – to come up with recommendations for reuse of not just the old hospital but the entire campus. It has great potential. City hall needs to be moved out of the congested downtown in a storm surge zone. Moving city hall to the old hospital site should be considered too. The commission should have professional staff support independent of the city’s executive branch to ensure the work is done honestly and independently of the City Council too that now operates subordinate to Mayor Reeves. Perhaps the Emerald Coast Regional Counsel could be hired to provide the professional support. The meeting on December 7th should be held as close as practicable to the old hospital. Holding the meeting at the Bayview Community Center seems part of a very deliberate effort to keep away people who live near the old hospital. We do already have a baseline for West Moreno District. If the city had cared in 2014 or 2016 – and there’s no evidence that Mayor Hayward or the City Council cared – then perhaps Baptist might have done as it said it wanted to do and add the 60,000 SF of “professional office space” it needed. Had that been done, there would have been no need to build a new hospital with a greatly reduced number of patient beds. The first link below is to a 2014 document posted to the city website that provides some very useful information the city ignored. The second 2016 document is “draft” and was not finalized.
https://www.cityofpensacola.com/DocumentCenter/View/6247/LWLP_West-Moreno-District_Final-Report-PDF-18-MB?bidId=
https://www.cityofpensacola.com/DocumentCenter/View/10819/DRAFT-Final-West-Moreno-Strategy-Dec2016-PDF-30-MB?bidId=