City-parish signs agreement to buy former Woman’s Hospital site for $10M

The city-parish has signed an agreement to purchase the former Woman’s Hospital campus at Airline Highway and Goodwood Boulevard for $10 million, city-parish and hospital officials announced this afternoon. If and when the deal is finalized, the facility will be renovated into a new Public Safety Complex that will also serve as a new headquarters for the Baton Rouge Police Department. The sale of the 24-acre campus would include the hospital building, medical office building, support services building, materials management building, parking garage and all surface parking. In a statement, Mayor Kip Holden says the deal for the property, which had been listed for $19 million, is almost too good to pass up. “Preliminary estimates are that it could cost as much to convert the hospital to office space that can be used by the police department,” Holden says, noting the facility would not house any prisoners. “But even if we spend a total of $20 million, that’s a fraction of the cost of constructing a new headquarters facility.” The existing police headquarters on Mayflower Street was constructed as a school in the 1930s, the city-parish says, and it was supposed to serve as a temporary headquarters when the Police Department moved there in 1989. The purchase proposal will be introduced on the Metro Council agenda Wednesday and will be taken up for consideration in January.