Delco’s Taylor Hospital sells to local investors aiming to offer medical services

Crozer Health’s shuttered Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park will be sold to a group of local healthcare executives for $1 million, according to an agreement filed Friday in bankruptcy court proceedings for its owner, California-based Prospect Medical Holdings.

The buyer is a partnership led by Delaware County business owner Todd Strine. The group’s goal is to refill the empty property with medical services, Strine said.

“The ideal thing that could happen is we reopen an emergency room, because that’s what Delaware County needs,” said Strine, who is the majority owner of medical transport company Keystone Quality Transport.

Prospect closed Taylor in late April after the failure of a state-led effort to find a new operator that would return the Crozer health system to nonprofit ownership. Shortly thereafter, Crozer-Chester Medical Center also closed.

Crozer was Delaware County’s largest healthcare system and a provider of critical safety-net services. For-profit Prospect had previously closed Springfield Hospital and Delaware County Memorial Hospital in 2022.

“It’s a fact that Delaware County is less safe today than it was when these hospitals were operating,” Strine said.

He said it seems unlikely that a full-blown hospital would return to Taylor.

Ridley Park Council president Dane Collins said he’s hopeful that an emergency department and doctors services will return to the site. “It’s no secret. The area’s in desperate need of it,” he said.

As part of the agreement, Delaware County, Ridley Park Borough, and the Ridley School District agreed to reduce the taxable value of the property from its assessed value of $60 million to a fair market value of $1 million for the next two years.

The inflated $60 million assessment was tied to financial deals Prospect undertook with a real estate investment firm in 2019 and 2023.

The reduced value slashes the amount of property taxes that can be earned on the property for the next two years. However, beginning in 2027, the taxing authorities would be permitted to appeal the value of the building.

The decision to reduce the building’s value so dramatically in tax rolls was opposed by some members of Ridley School District’s board of education, which only narrowly approved the measure on a 5 to 4 vote last week.

Prospect hasn’t paid property taxes on the property since 2022, according to public records.

Delaware County councilmember Christine Reuther called the new value a “tough pill to swallow” in an interview. The property was worth more than the “fire sale price” it had gone for, she said.

The building would be worth less than many homes on the county’s tax rolls, Reuther noted, at a time when property values and home costs are increasing.

She called the resolution yet another example of the negative fallout from Prospect’s abandonment of healthcare resources in the community.

“There’s literally nothing we can do that isn’t going to resolve in a worse result, and that’s wrong,” Reuther said.

Strine acknowledged that the price seems cheap, but noted the building is empty, and it’s a special-use building, making it harder to find tenants. “There’s a ton of carrying costs and a lot of uncertainty about how long it’s going to take to fill up,” he said.

The investment needed to bring the building back to life is going to be many times the price, Stine said.

“It’s positive movement to have an experienced local businessperson purchase the property instead of allowing the property to become abandoned,” said Frances Sheehan, president of the Foundation for Delaware County, whose mission is promoting health and welfare in the county.

Taylor is the second shuttered Crozer hospital to be sold in less than a month. Upper Darby School District bought the former Delaware County Memorial Hospital for $600,000 on Aug. 14. It plans to use the property for expansion of its neighboring high school.

In both cases, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan said Prospect could abandon the properties, which means that local authorities would have had to put the real estate up for a tax sale.

Prospect had told the judge that the top offers it had received were $1.25 million for Delaware County Memorial, which closed in 2022, and $575,000 for Taylor.

Given the risk of abandonment by Prospect, county and local authorities risked a total loss to tax rolls if Prospect abandoned the property entirely.

Robert Strauss, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies property tax, noted that the buyers may have backed out of a deal if they couldn’t obtain the reductions in property taxes.

“It’s hard to envision anything easy happening in the short run that would bring it back onto the tax rolls and be profitable,” he said. “The reduction in revenues seems to me to be inevitable in the next couple of years, regardless.”

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