The Boston Globe – Legal Battle Looms for St. Elizabeth’s Land
The Boston Globe says Last week, Governor Maura Healey announced a plan to seize St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center from failing Steward Health Care, and to hand it over to Boston Medical Center to keep it running.
In exchange, she said, she’d pay $4.5 million to the private equity firm that controls St. Elizabeth’s 14-acre campus on a hilltop in Brighton — a sum less than one-tenth what property rolls say the land is worth.
That discrepancy is expected to spark a legal battle that could stretch for years and cloud Healey’s plan to save the hospitals, a fight likely not so much about whether the state can take the St. Elizabeth’s property, but rather the price it will pay.
“If someone said to me, ‘You’re going to be over by St. Elizabeth’s in the city of Boston, you’re going to make a taking of 14 or 15 acres with a building improvement of that size, and you’re going to pay $4.5 million,’ I would say to them: ‘You must have just come in from the planet Mars,’” said Peter Flynn, an attorney who is representing the owner of the former Wonderland race track in its eminent domain fight with the City of Revere. “Something is amiss.”