Nashville’s mayor strikes a deal with Meharry to settle debt over General Hospital

Meharry Medical College President James Hildreth has been trying to get Metro Nashville to pay more for the use of its hospital building since he arrived on campus in 2015. And assuming the Metro Council approves a deal struck with Mayor John Cooper, that stumbling block is gone.

The outline of the agreement, released late Friday, would require the city to pay an additional $6.3 million per year, increasing 2.5% each year through 2027. That’s when the lease for the 415,000-square-foot hospital expires. Previously, the city was paying only the underlying bonds, which was roughly $4 million per year. Those bonds will be paid off next year.

The deal also settles past disagreements between Metro and Meharry over parking and utility costs.

“As a result of this agreement, we’re actually releasing the city from all claims to those prior expenses that were owed,” Hildreth tells WPLN News.

The disagreement dates back to the forced marriage between Meharry’s struggling Hubbard Hospital and Nashville General, which was in need of a new home when its facility near the downtown closed in the 1990s.

The $6.3 million figure comes from independent real estate evaluation experts, according to a statement from the mayor’s office. The property on Meharry’s North Nashville campus has become far more valuable in recent years.

“Meharry and Nashville General are at the center of our efforts to address health disparities in Nashville, and this new agreement sets the stage for that work to grow stronger in 2023,” the mayor said in a written statement.

Cooper is alluding to discussions about building a new General Hospital. Leaders of the safety-net facility, who work for the Hospital Authority and not Meharry, have wanted to move to a new site, possibly in MetroCenter. The old hospital on Meharry’s campus has been deemed beyond repair.

Hospital leaders have said they still want to be the main teaching hospital for Meharry students and residents. But the school has different ideas about where a new hospital should go.

“We’re all on board in terms of building a new safety-net hospital, and for a lot of reasons we believe it should be on our campus,” Hildreth says. “Now we can have that conversation in earnest now that we have that behind us, which is a big part of this whole thing.”