BARBERTON: Summa Health officials want to raze the aging parking deck at their Barberton hospital, a decaying albatross that has cost them $1 million in the past four years to maintain.
But to make up for the lost parking spaces, they’ll need to take Tuscora Park’s only ballfield — 5 more acres from an east side park that has lost nearly half its land to hospital expansion — and get the city to permanently close a portion of Paige Avenue.
Tuesday evening, hospital and city officials presented their idea to a small gathering at the Tuscora Park pavilion. Unlike public meetings in past years, where surrounding residents rallied to try to prevent the loss of park land, only half a dozen neighbors showed up.
Among them was Mary Whitton, who said she chose her Baird Avenue home a decade ago because of the park view.
“What do I get out of this? When I look outside, I’ll see a parking lot,” she said.
City Council President Fred Maurer said that while losing more park property might mean “stepping on a few toes,” he stressed that the city is landlocked with little room for new development and needs to do everything it can to keep the city’s largest private taxpayer healthy.
In making its pitch, Summa noted that it employs nearly 1,100 people in Barberton, makes a $2 million “economic impact” in the city, provides $3.5 million in free or subsidized health care at the local campus, and invests $60,000 annually in community programming. It also has some $32 million in capital projects underway this year or planned for the near future.
Dr. Michael Hughes, senior vice president of hospital operations, explained Summa Barberton currently has 1,087 parking spaces between the 42-year-old parking deck and a couple of surface lots. On most days, visitors are charged a fee to park in the deck.
The plan under consideration would provide 1,300 ground-level free-parking spots by:
• Vacating the portion of Paige Avenue that cuts between the hospital and its parking deck. Delivery trucks that now use Paige would instead use Lake Avenue, a residential street on the opposite side of the parking deck.
• Paving a wooded lot the hospital currently owns behind the hospital. Fifty or more mature trees would need to be cut down, and the hospital would have them planed and donated to the high school’s wood shop.
• Leasing up to 5 acres of Tuscora Park, a section used as the only city-owned baseball field on the city’s east side. With no area in Tuscora large enough to accommodate another competitive-size field, the hospital would pay to have a similar ballfield built in McCafferty Park on the city’s west side.
The hospital would pay $17,500 a year for 10 years for leasing the land, bringing the total to the land’s appraised value of $175,000.
Payment for field
In addition, the hospital would give the city a one-time payment of $275,000 — $75,000 to build the new McCafferty ballfield, and $200,000 that the city could use at will or hold in reserve should the hospital end its lease and the city want to return that parking area to green space.
If approved, construction would begin after the spring 2017 senior leagues finish their season at Tuscora Park, and the city would begin work at McCafferty so that field is ready for the following year.
The parking deck would be razed and the new parking lot in place by the summer of 2018, about the same time Summa expects to finish other projects (including a new imaging center and renovated outpatient operating rooms) which it expects to increase parking needs.
“After that, in nine years, nobody knows what health care is going to look like,” Hughes said. “We may be doing telemedicine at a lot of homes and not need all that parking. If that happens, the provision is that the leased property would return to green space.”
The city’s Parks Commission gave thumbs up to the new lease last week, sending it to the City Council for final approval.
The council plans to have the first of three readings on the legislation Monday, with the public having up to six weeks to speak out on the project.
After another local resident bemoaned the loss of a field that brings city-operated day camps to the east side, council member Carla Debevec suggested the city look into turning an underused lawn at Tuscora into a smaller recreational ballfield that could still be used by campers and neighborhood children.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.