What might be next for the St. Luke's campus, considered a 'prime development parcel?'

With 101 days left until the Wynn Hospital opens in downtown Utica, local officials have taken another step to find a new use for the existing St Luke’s Campus of the Mohawk Valley Health System.

A request for proposal went out on Thursday looking for a company to assess the challenges and assets of the existing campus and its buildings, including any structures or partial structures that could be reused, an environmental assessment and the costs of any demolition or remedial work that needs to be done, local officials announced at a press conference Thursday morning at St. Luke’s.

A second request for proposal will go out on Sept. 7 for a master reuse plan that will include three conceptual mixed-use designs for the property and incorporate community input. The return dates for the RFPs are Aug. 31 and Sept. 7.

“In many communities, when new structures are built, old structures just kind of remain,” Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente Jr. said, noting that the partners are working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen here.

In fact, Picente, MVHS President/CEO Darlene Stromstad, New Hartford Town Supervisor Paul Miscione and Mohawk Valley EDGE President Steve DiMeo all stressed their commitment to a reuse plan that will benefit the community through a combination of beauty, walkability, tax revenues and uses that benefit the whole county.

“You work, your live, you shop there,” Miscione said. “These are things everyone’s looking for.”

Miscione said he could also see a beautiful park going in along the wetlands on the property.

Officials also expressed their confidence that finding developers to follow through on a reuse plan won’t be hard. The 53-acre parcel sits in New Hartford next to its border with Utica, at the intersection of major roads near the North-South Arterial, along public transportation routes and across the street from Utica University in an area with both residential and commercial development, they noted.

“This is a strategic location,” DiMeo said. “It’s a prime development parcel. In fact, I think it may be one of the best development sites in the county.”

And development will likely be a boon for both county and New Hartford budgets, Picente and Miscione said.

“For the Town of New Hartford,” Miscione said, “this could be the next generation of our commercial hub.”

Commercial real estate taxes and sales tax make up a huge portion of the town budget; without them property taxes would be three or four times as high, he said. So new development can keep revenues growing.

“It’s a great, great financial gain to our budget,” he said, predicting an increase of as much as 15 to 20 percent.

This kind of development helps to reduce the tax burden on everybody else, Picente agreed.

The Wynn Hospital will open in October, at which time the hospitals on the health system’s St. Luke’s and St. Elizabeth campuses will no longer be needed. The city and the health system announced in July that they had hired a development team led by the Buffalo-based law firm of Rupp Pfalzgraf to draft a reuse plan for the St. Elizabeth campus. The St. Elizabeth re-use plan is expected to include mixed-use development that will blend in with the surrounding neighborhoods and commercial corridor along Genesee Street.

The health system had previously had a re-use study done in 2019, with results released in 2020, on both campuses, but the COVID-19 distracted everyone from following through with it and market conditions have since changed, Stromstad noted. So, she said, it’s time for a fresh look.

On the St. Luke’s Campus, the health system’s Center for Rehabilitation and Continuing Care Services,  which includes the health system’s nursing home, will remain in its separate building permanently.

The system also owns buildings on Burrstone Road that house its dental residency clinic and day care; its human resources department (in a small house); and offices, the board room and medical student housing (in a former motel). For now, these will stay put, Stromstad said. But she emphasized that MVHS is willing to sell them (but not the continuing care center) immediately if someone wants to use them.

The campus also contains a co-generation plant, owned and operated by Burrstone Energy Center,  provides heating, cooling and electricity to the hospital, the continuing care center and Utica University. The consultant hired to do the site assessment will have to determine whether that plant could serve any new development on the property, officials said.

Any re-use plan will almost certainly involve demolition of at least part of the approximately 700,000-square-foot hospital, DiMeo said. The master re-use plan will make it easier for a developer to come in because pre-permitting, site vetting, proper zoning and a State Environmental Quality Review will all be in place, he said.

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: MVHS St. Luke's Campus: New Hartford site likely to see new uses