They wanted to build a nursing home for West Baltimore's poor.
The owners had a 100-year-old history of caring for the elderly and infirm. Everyone supported the idea. Politicians pledged nearly $6 million in public funds. Methodist churches in Maryland donated $1.3 million from their collection baskets. Widows and senior citizens offered bake-sale receipts.
The N. M. Carroll Health Care Facility was to be the first community-based, minority-owned and operated nursing home in West Baltimore.
Not only would it relieve a nursing home bed shortage in the city and provide essential care for 140 of Baltimore's neediest, it would also deliver 120 jobs with a $2.1 million payroll to an impoverished neighborhood.
The reality, however, of the N. M. Carroll project is this:
A health care facility that should have been completed in 13 months sits empty on a ragged, overgrown plot at Monroe and Gilmor streets.
The windows of the building are boarded up or broken. A blue sign out front reads: "Securing Tomorrow Today."
The facility, for which Methodist churches began collecting money more than 25 years ago, outspent its budget of $7.3 million. While the state and federal governments helped finance the nursing home, the city is out $3.4 million because of the project's troubles.
The owner of the project -- a community, non-profit corporation associated with the successful N. M. Carroll Manor senior citizens complex -- needs yet another $1.2 million to finish the debt-ridden project. Elderly neighbors -- some died waiting for the nursing home to open -- are still hoping N. M. Carroll will care for them when they no longer can care for themselves.
Nubra W. Floyd, a 91-year-old widow who lives at the N. M. Carroll Manor, has donated "a sizable" sum of money to the nursing home project. And she intends to spend her last days there "if I live until they are completed."
So what went wrong? What happened to this project with political, financial and community support that state and city officials and neighborhood leaders insisted was urgently needed -- and still is?
"It's a classic case of a group getting into a business they were unfamiliar with, and these economic times are very unforgiving," said Ed Thomas, president of Asbury Methodist Village, a health care complex in Gaithersburg that considered taking over the troubled project.
N. M. Carroll has done a "super job" of providing housing for the elderly at its North Arlington Avenue complex, Mr. Thomas said. But he added, "When you go into a new business and you don't know it, sometimes you make mistakes. Today, you make one or two mistakes and you can be gone."
Costs keep rising
Problems have plagued the nursing home ever since the architects sketched the initial design more than six years ago. The three-story, L-shaped complex designed by an Oxon Hill firm would have cost more money to build than N. M. Carroll anticipated.
"We were determined not to go over our head," said Lawrence C. Custis, an N. M. Carroll board member and retired state employee. "We knew what we could afford. We were talking about a non-profit home, [to] bring it in in a reasonable amount of money."
The nursing home had to be redesigned. But when the project was rebid, the total cost escalated from $4.5 million to $7.2 million. The new amount exceeded what the state had approved for the project. So in August 1987, N. M. Carroll returned to the state Health Resources Planning Commission.
In part, N. M. Carroll officials argued, the original cost of the project had been underestimated. But they acknowledged other problems as well.
"First, the architect chosen was not experienced in Maryland health care facilities, and many of the design changes have resulted from the need to comply with Maryland requirements," James Ethridge, president of the proposed facility, wrote to the commission.
And, despite $1.5 million in state grants, $736,346 in federal funds and $1.3 million in church and community donations, "local banks have twice expressed last-minute reluctance to finance a minority-run facility in a low-income neighborhood," Mr. Ethridge said in his letter.
N. M. Carroll then turned to the city of Baltimore to shore up the project. On Aug. 12, 1987, the day before the facility's state authorization was due to expire, the city agreed to guarantee a $3.2 million revenue bond that would finance construction of the nursing home.
The facility broke ground a little more than a year later. During construction, the state's health-planning architect and others raised concerns about the design -- inadequate multipurpose rooms to accommodate 139 patients, too few bathrooms to serve 16 patients in an adult day-care program, a kitchen lacking the minimum space requirements for the patients, and misplaced nursing stations.
By the spring of 1991, the nursing home was in financial trouble. In June, the facility could not make the first of its two annual loan payments. Money it needed to finish construction of the building -- $350,000 -- had gone to make previous debt payments.
"There are no professionals in this project at all," said Mr. Ethridge of the community-based board that oversaw the nursing home. "Maybe that was a mistake. They were people who had a vision, who had a hope, who tried to put this all together. Nobody else was trying to provide something like this for this community."
The five-story brick building, although 95 percent complete, has design flaws that the state's health-planning architect says would need to be corrected before the facility could receive a license to open.
And although Baltimore's housing agency was responsible for monitoring the project from its inception, officials there claim that it was only in the spring of 1991 that they realized the developer was having financial problems.
Then, contractors complained that they weren't being paid. They walked off the job in June and sued to recoup $409,502 they are owed.
The city itself is out $3.4 million, money it paid when the nursing home defaulted on the revenue bond. The nursing home also is behind on payments on a $21,000 city loan used to buy the land.
Although the N. M Carroll board hired consultants to provide the expertise they lacked, some familiar with the project believe the bTC advice cost them time and money the project could ill afford. The project got away from them, said state Sen. Larry Young of Baltimore, who helped secure the state funding.
"As costs escalated, the consultants they used gave them bad advice along the way," Mr. Young said. "Cash flow has been the major, major problem. Now they are trying to regroup."
Finding a way out
The city, which provides 24-hour security for the building, is trying to find investors to take over the project.
Federal officials have frozen $162,000, the remainder of a $736,346 Urban Development Action Grant the project received. And they have requested a full accounting from the city.
City housing officials -- who refused repeated requests by The Sun to provide financial documents on the project -- said they are not yet prepared to say whether the public money was properly spent.
"The dollars were there to start. The site was there. The one thing that proved to be a concern was the administrative wherewithal to get it completed," said David K. Elam, director of development for the city's housing agency.
Senator Young, who tried to interest California investors in the nursing home, said that while he would make a plea for additional state aid, he was doubtful it would be forthcoming.
"I don't think the city or the state can take another hit," said Mr. Young, who grew up across the street from N. M. Carroll home when it was located on Carrollton Avenue. "The only way this is going to be done is if somebody is willing to invest $3 [million] to $4 million in the project and wait three to five [years] to get a return."
"There is enough Afro-American business capital in Baltimore to do this project," added the senator. "It would be a major, gross neglect on the part of the Afro-American community if we let another institution fold."
The N. M. Carroll tradition began 121 years ago when Nathaniel Monroe Carroll, a black minister at the Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church, urged his church members to care for the elderly.
To keep that dream alive, Mr. Custis and others have sought money from wealthy foundations, Philippine millionaires and Methodist church leaders in New York.
A fund-raiser last year brought in $50,000, and board members hope a March 23 event will raise another $100,000.
Mr. Ethridge, the nursing home president, said he and the others have given up hope of operating the facility themselves; they just want it to open.
"Black folk in churches always found a way to make it, when things were tight and money wasn't there," he said. "For 121 years, N. M. Carroll has managed to do it -- meet the standards and serve people. . . . It's been because God has deemed it."