) -Last September, Baptist Hospital moved to their new campus on brent lane after being at their old campus on Moreno Street for over 70 years. Since the move the city and Baptist have been working on a way to turn the campus into affordable housing.
Earlier this year, the city and Baptist Hospital signed a letter of intent saying Baptist would donate the legacy campus to the city if they could get funding to demolish and remediate it to be used for affordable housing. The city took its first step with Governor Ron DeSantis approving $7 million for the project. Over the last few months, the city has also brought on a demolition and abatement consultant to help them figure out next steps.
“I hope our next step is from there would be these consultants would help us craft an RFP or RFQ based on their analysis to say hey potentially this could be saved, this couldn’t, here are the environmental issues,” said Mayor D.C. Reeves. “Certainly, there’s not the expertise in our building of abatement of that size. We’re going to lean on outside experts.