Sedgwick County drops former Riverside Hospital as site for new government center
After kicking the tires, Sedgwick County has dropped a plan to buy the former Riverside Hospital to turn it into a government center.
The old hospital building at 2622 W. Central had marked the most serious effort to date to move county government out of the downtown courthouse to clear space for more courtrooms and prosecutors’ offices.
“A number of commissioners have walked through the facility, we’ve had our facilities folks take a look at the condition of the building . . . we’ve had architects over there looking at three or four different options on that building,” said Commissioner David Dennis. “What is obvious is that building does not meet the needs of Sedgwick County as we move forward.”
In December, the commission unanimously approved a purchase contract for $4.1 million and put a $25,000 refundable deposit on the building.
That contract was contingent on various evaluations, including the condition of the building itself and the cost it would take to remodel it as a home for county departments.
The county has been looking for a government center building for the past several years.
The five-story hospital building has 170,000 square feet and 400 parking spaces, which would have been enough to move the county’s offices from the courthouse, the election commissioner’s offices from the Historic Courthouse, and to pull back in some other county departments currently spread out in leased space around Wichita.
The county executed the purchase contract with the building’s owner, I Thrive LLC, after rejecting an earlier proposal from a development group called West River Partners LLC., led by Old Town developer Dave Burk.
Burk and his partners had purchased an option on the hospital and sought to resell it to the county in a package deal that would have included renovating it for government use.
That deal would have cost three payments of $3 million over three years, plus an undetermined final payment to bring the selling price up to the appraised value of the renovated building.
The county rejected the deal as too open-ended and waited for the Burk group’s option to expire before inking the contract with I Thrive.
This story was originally published February 17, 2021 at 12:40 PM.
