Page 15 - Vol.5 No. 7 July 2021

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Solaris’ board to allow the city to oversee the process of soliciting prospective redevelopers. The health system agreed, clearing the way for local leaders to spearhead that process in tandem with a third- party firm.
As Colgan notes, Mayor Adrian Mapp played a critical role in keeping the process on track, despite the protests of city residents.
“The mayor was committed to doing something with this campus, and I give (him) a lot of credit,” he said. “It was a very, very difficult project for him to tackle because it was a closed hospital and the community felt very strongly that the hospital should have been reopened.
“The community was almost unwilling to accept anything other than a hospital at the location, so for a mayor that wants to convert a building, with the reality being that you’re not going to reopen a hospital in Plainfield and with the community expecting the hospital to reopen, it’s kind of a losing proposition.”
Yet Mapp “took on the challenge,” recognizing that a shuttered, 550,000-square-foot building in
the city “clearly doesn’t serve the community well.” The resulting solicitation prioritized concepts that called for reopening the hospital, however unlikely that was. Absent that, the process would give the highest marks to projects that would bring health care jobs back to the site.
CHA’s plan did exactly that. While the proposal would go through several changes, the firm ultimately won approval for 186,000 square feet of medical arts space and 120 market-rate apartments. The project would also equate to an estimated 550 health care jobs.
Yet the company still faced pushback in the ensuing years from residents who were skeptical that
it would follow through on building market-rate apartments and, if it did, that there would be sufficient demand. CHA forged ahead, winning approvals from the city in 2018 and paving the way for it to seek the blessing of state health regulators.
Redeveloping the campus meant choosing whether to repurpose the existing buildings or tear them
Bill Colgan, managing partner of
Bloomfield-based CHA Partners, has spearheaded the firm’s effort to redevelop the Muhlenberg Regional
Medical Center campus in Plainfield. Plans call for 120 market-rate apartments and a 186,000-square-foot medical arts complex.
down and start from scratch. CHA opted for the former, at least with respect to about two-thirds of
the complex that it deemed to be usable. That included about 180,000 square feet inside the medical center’s tower building, which lent
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