The act of sale for the nearly 300 acres of land that currently encompasses the former Southeast Louisiana Psychiatric Hospital – now known as Northlake Behavioral Health – will be held, Thursday, March 26, 2015, at 2pm.  The sale is between the state of Louisiana and St. Tammany Parish.  The parish negotiated a sales price of

$15.4 million to buy the property, and the parish plans on utilizing the land for a few different purposes: possible expansion for Pelican Park, a new roadway from Hwy. 190 (Florida St.) to 1088 reducing congestion for both Hwy. 190 and Hwy. 59, and to bolster the government’s wetland mitigation bank.

St. Tammany Parish’s wetland mitigation bank is served by Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank which also serves the wetland preservation needs of Washington and Tangipahoa Parishes.  It will also review requests for credit from areas outside of these areas on a case-by-case basis.  The idea is that builders and developers may purchase a one-time credit from the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank to offset the impacts that their construction will have on the wetlands involved with the project.  They must offer another portion of the project that is close to or adjacent to the job that they own in exchange for this credit so that the wetlands in other areas are preserved.

“When impacts to jurisdictional wetlands are unavoidable, a one-time credit purchase from the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank prevents mitigation cost overruns and irrevocably transfers your perpetual mitigation liability to Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), one of the nation’s leading providers of environmental credits,” according to the website for the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank.

St. Tammany Parish’s Pelican Park may purchase as much as 100 acres of the land involved in Thursday’s act of

sale to expand upon its already 321-acre park. In conjunction with the expansion is the hope that St. Tammany Parish will go ahead with the road building / expansion project between 190 and 1088 in order to construct a second entrance to Pelican Park on this cut-through road.

The “fate” of Northlake Behavioral Health is secured through this act of sale because one of the conditions of the purchase was that St. Tammany Parish leave the buildings and land belonging to the psychiatric hospital campus intact and operating as a behavioral health hospital.  Meridian Behavioral Healthcare, the current company that mangages operations at the hospital through a privatization program has expressed interested in purchasing the entire campus and land from St. Tammany Parish.

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