Mayor Rick Kriseman has picked a team featuring the Moffitt Cancer Center to redevelop 4.6 acres just south of downtown St. Petersburg, paving the way for a new cancer treatment clinic in Pinellas County.
The proposal includes a 75,000-square-foot medical building, large enough to accommodate 8,000 patients per year. The center’s plan says it will create 200 new jobs over five years and eliminate 75,000 hours of travel time for cancer patients.
“The ultimate goal is, how do we take the best care closer to home?” said Moffitt Chief Operating Officer Sabi Singh. “Patients don’t need to worry about beating traffic. They should be thinking about how to beat cancer. And we want to bring that care closer to them.”
The Moffitt bid, which also included Atlanta developers TPA Group and St. Petersburg’s United Insurance Holdings Corp., was unsolicited, which meant that in order to consider it, the city had to open the site up to competing proposals. Five other groups offered between $5 million and $16 million, including one that pledged to incorporate room for a Moffitt center. The Moffitt bid was for $5 million; full terms of the agreement will be negotiated soon.
Related: Moffitt proposing cancer treatment center in downtown St. Petersburg
The winning plan doesn’t just include a cancer center. Like the other proposals, it includes residences (a 350-unit tower, 10 percent of which would be considered workforce housing), street-level retail, a public 500-space parking garage and room for future development, which could include a hotel. It also allows for the “retention and future expansion” of United’s headquarters.
“Having a Moffitt Cancer Center facility in the heart of our downtown, near both our Innovation District and the Tropicana Field site, is a home run for St. Petersburg,” Kriseman said in a statement. “We are a healthier city when residents in need of quality outpatient care can focus on beating cancer and not the traffic. I am especially pleased that this proposal includes a much-needed residential tower with workforce units and a public parking garage in a part of St. Pete primed for even more growth.”
The city of St. Petersburg has picked Moffitt Cancer Center to purchase and redevelop the 800 block of Second Avenue S, where it will build a 75,000-square-foot cancer treatment center, 350-unit residential tower and more. [ Google Earth ]
The block sits between Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital and the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. The Pinellas County property appraiser valued the land at $11 million.
“With All Children’s Hospital, we’ve worked with them for the past 35 years, and we’ll continue working with them,” said Moffitt physician-in-chief Doug Letson. “It’ll be beneficial, because there are some of our physicians that do children and adults, and they’ll be closer to the facility. There’ll be some synergism, certainly, with All Children’s Hospital.”
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The proposal said its initial phase, including the Moffitt center and parking garage, could be under construction as early as the second quarter of 2022; Singh said he hoped doors could open by late 2023 or early 2024. Alan Delisle, the city’s development administrator, said that once a term sheet is hashed out with Moffitt, TPA and United, he hopes a development agreement can get before the City Council “fairly quickly.”
“To have a significant partner like Moffitt coming downtown is great for the patients that have been traveling back and forth, but it’s also great for our Innovation District and for our business development opportunities moving forward,” Delisle said. “To add Moffitt to Johns Hopkins and Bayfront and the university, that’s a major step forward for the Innovation District. And it’s right next to the Trop, so I think it’s going to have a positive development on the Trop development, as well.”