Flood-damaged Milwaukee hospital ready for wrecking ball (UPDATE)

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By Marie Rohde

Faced with damaged property and no potential buyers, the nonprofit owner of the vacant St. Michael Hospital on Milwaukee‘s north side has decided to tear down the structure.

Bids to raze the hospital will be let in December, according to Anne Ballentine, a spokeswoman for the owner, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare Southeast Wisconsin Inc. Demolition will begin after the spring thaw, she said.

A massive sewage backup and flooding during the July storms combined to be the final blow to the hospital that has been largely vacant since 2006. An insurance company is dealing with the extensive damage caused by the floods, Ballentine said.

“We’ve worked hard to market the complex without success,” she said. “We were offering to give it away.”

Ballentine declined to give a dollar estimate of the damage to the complex or the expected cost of the demolition. The 800,000-square-foot hospital has seven stories and a basement.

The family health care clinic that was in a building on the complex site was destroyed by the sewage backup. The clinic has been temporarily moved to a 14,500-square-foot portion of the main hospital. It will remain there for about 18 months, when a new clinic is completed, Ballentine said.

“We are still looking for a permanent location for the clinic,” she said. “It could be on that site or it could be elsewhere.”

The clinic is a cooperative venture of the Medical College of Wisconsin and St. Joseph’s Hospital, another Wheaton hospital.

The future of the 8-acre Villard Avenue site is up in the air.

“We were committed to doing something with the building for the good of the community,” Ballentine said. “But that is no longer an option.”

Ashanti Hamilton, the alderman who represents the district, said he was unaware of the decision to raze the building.

“Much of the discussion we’ve had has been on other uses for the building,” he said. “We’ll have to start with opening the lines of communication with Wheaton to see where to go from here.”

Hamilton said he supported a 2007 proposal by Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker to move a portion of the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex to the site. But a county report found that it would cost as much as $29 million to renovate the St. Michael complex, far more than the cost of fixing the existing mental health complex on the Milwaukee County Grounds in Wauwatosa. Walker argued that selling 25 acres on the County Grounds would more than pay for the St. Michael project.

“That was the highest and best use,” Hamilton said. “But it did not have the support of the County Board.”

In June 2006, St. Michael was closed because the hospital was hemorrhaging financially. In the 2005 fiscal year, it lost $22.9 million; the four preceding years saw a combined deficit of $74.2 million. At the time, one floor was empty and others were partly used.

Although the family care clinic remained open, the loss of the hospital was seen as a major blow to the city’s poor. Many of St. Michael’s patients were impoverished.

Because it is owned by a nonprofit organization, the property is not taxed. But the city tax rolls value the land at $170,900 and the buildings at $385,100.

Rocky Marcoux, commissioner of the Department of City Development, said he had been unaware of the raze plans but was not surprised. He agreed that moving the mental health complex to the building was the best alternative.

“Now that the decision has been made to raze, I think the owners will have a lot of options,” Marcoux said. “It’s got easy access and it’s right across from the (Lincoln) park.”