Community Hospital — what now?

Community Hospital has served as an anchor for New Port Richey for more than 40 years. After Tuesday, though, Community Hospital will be no more.

Patients were transferred to the new, modern facility, Medical Center of Trinity, near State Road 54 and Little Road.

The building on Marine Parkway now bears a new name — Medical Center of Trinity West Pasco Campus — and a new mission.

The only problem is nobody quite knows what the mission might be, city officials recently said.

A redevelopment plan for the area should take shape in the months ahead, City Manager John Schneiger said, once a contractor can be hired this spring.

The hospital still generates about 8 percent of the property tax revenue the city collects each year. In its heyday, it produced 13 percent of that revenue.

Hospital buildings comprise about 400,000 square feet of space, and about 75 percent of that is vacant.

Hospital officials last week pledged to support the city's renewal efforts in the neighborhood near Community Hospital, Schneiger said.

However, a plan to keep a satellite emergency room at the former Community Hospital appears defunct, Schneiger said. State regulators wanted more extensive renovations than hospital officials had expected, making a satellite ER too costly.

The hospital is maintaining the satellite location for behavioral health services. At most, the hospital will use about 100,000 square feet.

Schneiger still holds out hope that the vacant hospital structures can be remodeled for different uses.

Last month, a city consultant warned that remodeling usually is more expensive than tearing down vacant structures and rebuilding.

The hospital controls about 25 acres; Schneiger wants any renewal plan to cover about twice that area, including the neighborhood that sprang up around the sprawling hospital campus.

The proposed Grande Marine District Neighborhood Plan first surfaced at a city council workshop in December.

Pasco County growth management officials have pledged to devote staff time to help the city reduce the cost of planning, which Schneiger put at $55,000. The city probably will enlist the Pasco Economic Development Commission for help as well.

The process may involve about six community meetings to get ideas from the public, Schneiger said.

A consultant had cautioned the process could take five to 10 years or longer.

"Nobody is going to ride in on a white horse," Thomas R. Kohler, a principal of Orlando-based Real Estate Research Consultants, said at the workshop in December.

The value comes from the 25 acres of real estate, Kohler said, not the buildings. Hospitals often can be hard to renovate for different uses, he said.

The fate of "mom and pop medical offices and ancillary businesses" near the hospital concerned Councilwoman Ginny Miller. They could suffer from the vacuum created by the departure of Community Hospital, she said in December.

"They want to do the right thing," Mayor Bob Consalvo said in December of HCA officials. HCA is the company that owns the hospital. "That's the feeling I got from the meeting" with hospital executives.