More in-depth building assessment needed, says city's Public Health chief

A working group assembled to make recommendations about the future use of the former Carney Hospital met for the second time last Friday (Nov. 15) and focused much of its attention on the current state of the 12.7-acre campus on Dorchester Avenue and the financial realities of the health care marketplace in Massachusetts.

EDITORIAL: Taking the vitals of our post-Carney closure communities

The 32-member Dorchester Working Group – appointed mainly by Mayor Wu and managed by the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) – will be asked to make recommendations to Gov. Healey and the mayor based on their review and discussions with experts in finance and the health care sector. The group was initially asked to give its findings by the end of the year, but a revised schedule now has them meeting through the end of January.

The group is co-chaired by Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, the commissioner of Public Health for the city of Boston, along with Michael Curry, the president and CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers.

Ojikutu told The Reporter on Monday that the presentations made to the working group last Friday included statements from city planning officials who explained the current zoning restrictions at the Carney campus, and other city officials who toured the Carney buildings after the hospital was closed to the public at the end of August.

“The working group is still in the data sharing, information gathering, and establishing a baseline for decision-making phase of our process,” said Ojikutu. “So, the focus of this meeting was on the site and the buildings, keeping in mind that most of the working group has not really been on a tour recently or even in the last days prior to closure, to give them a sense of the size of the land… and the status of the buildings and more about the zoning context.”

Two Boston officials – Patricia Cafferky, the deputy chief of Operations, and Eamon Shelton, the Commissioner of Property Management – offered an initial assessment of the main Carney building, a 759,000-square-foot complex, which they reported was “in fairly good condition” overall, according to a description of the presentation shared with The Reporter. The city team noted that “some areas of the building were renovated in the last decade, including the Emergency Department (2014), the Seton outpatient clinic (2021), the wound care clinic (2015), and 5 new operating rooms.”

“A new owner may be able to operate the building with minimal changes to the buildings in the short term,” Cafferky and Shelton reported, although they noted it would “need all new furnishings and equipment.”

In a Monday interview, Ojikutu cautioned that the overview of the physical plant conditions was based on a “walk-through” by city officials. “A robust facility conditions assessment would need to be made to really ascertain the state of all building systems and the building envelope,” she said, to get a more accurate sense of the “remaining useful life and estimated repair and to report replacement costs for any of the building elements.”

She added: “I think that the sum of that is that there are certainly deferred capital improvements for building systems. [It’s] likely these would result in significant costs if the building itself as it stands would be used. These capital improvements would need to be made within the next five to ten years,” she said.

Among the deferred maintenance projects on the city’s initial checklist, according to those briefed on Friday, are elevator replacements, a new generator estimated to cost $12 million, new boiler and mechanical systems, windows, and roof repairs. The parking garage that is attached to the hospital has “major structural issues” and is currently closed.

The Carney campus also includes the Seton medical office building at the rear of the property that remains in operation with as many as 70 patients per day visiting primary care physicians, specialists, and a Quest lab, all of whom maintain offices in the three-story building. 

The working group also heard an in-depth presentation on health care spending and payment models from Dr. Zirui Song, an economist with Harvard Medical School. 

Ojikutu said that Song’s presentation was meant to “set up our future conversations about potential models and healthcare utilization for the future, if that is the direction that the working group wants to go in.”

The mayor has been emphatic in saying repeatedly that her administration will insist that any re-use of the Carney campus must be for health care purposes. At Friday’s meeting, city Chief of Planning Kairos Shen offered an overview of the Carney’s current zoning context.

“I think that it was important for the Boston Planning Department to restate what Mayor Wu has already stated, that Boston will use its land authority to ensure the site continues to be used for the provision of health-related services,” said Ojikutu. “Our plan is that whatever we’re doing here is going to involve health service delivery.”

What form that health care re-use might take, Ojikutu said this week, is “for a later discussion, which we plan to have very soon.”

The working group will meet again in virtual settings on Dec. 5 and Dec. 18. A promised “public listening session” has not yet been scheduled.

The organization Health Care for All (HCFA), which has been hired to conduct community engagement for the working group, has been tasked with canvassing the Carney catchment area. According to Friday’s presentation, workers from HCFA are knocking on doors to interview residents.

The Carney working group includes 11 “ex-officio” members, most of them elected officials, including US Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Stephen F. Lynch, state Sen. Nick Collins, state Rep. Brandy Fluker Oakley, and Boston City Councillors Ruthzee Louijeune and John FitzGerald. The state’s chief of Public Health, Dr. Robbie Goldstein, Boston EMS Chief James Holley, Dr. Kiame Mahaniah of the state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services, Boston’s new Chief of Planning Kairos Shen, and Amy Rosenthal of Health Care for All are also ex officio members.