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Attorneys hope
to extend option
to summer 2003
[email protected]
Harrisburg attorneys Burton Morris and Michael Daley bought an option last July to purchase the former Polyclinic Hospital campus in uptown Harrisburg and redevelop it into an office complex. Their plan was to sign enough deals so they could buy the property by early this summer.
With no tenants signed yet and their option set to expire July 17, the attorneys have reassessed their time frame and are now hoping to be able to buy the 363,000-square-foot campus by spring or summer 2003, Daley said. PinnacleHealth System owns the campus.
“Our real estate experts have been telling us we didn’t allow ourselves enough time,” Daley said. “The first lease is the hardest one to get. If the first lease crashes, they’re stuck in this big, old hospital building.”
The attorneys have identified nine or 10 potential tenants, Daley said, declining to disclose their identities. Once the first tenant signs a lease, others will follow suit, he said. The types of businesses the lawyers are seeking include office users, a day care center, a restaurant, a health club and a bank.
PinnacleHealth will likely extend its option with Morris and Daley for another year, said Chris Markley, senior vice president of community and governmental relations for PinnacleHealth. On June 24, the health system’s executive committee will decide whether to extend the agreement, he said.
Markley declined to say how much money the attorneys would have to pay to extend their option, nor would he say what the existing option costs.
“Daley and Morris have done a lot of good work and have a lot of interested parties,” Markley said. “It just takes a while to get the first tenant to sign. It would be nice to sell the buildings by the end of this year.”
Markley would not disclose how much money the health system wants for its campus.
PinnacleHealth had originally hoped to sell the property to Morris and Daley by next month, Markley said. The lawyers plan to transform the three-building, 6-acre campus into a business park that would be called Penn Center Harrisburg. About 90 percent of the available space would be reserved for office users, with the remainder set aside for commercial users.
The redevelopment project would create several hundred jobs and return the campus to the city’s tax rolls for the first time since 1926, the year the hospital opened. The attorneys expect to spend more than $5 million to redevelop the campus.
PinnacleHealth, which owns the property in the 2600 block of North Third Street, no longer needs the complex because of consolidations that followed the 1996 merger of Polyclinic and Harrisburg hospitals. As a result of that deal, PinnacleHealth, Harrisburg, owns both hospitals.
