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Address: 2801 N Gantenbein Ave.
Year built: 2012
Square footage: 1,400
Market value: $55 million (entire building)
Owner: Legacy Emanuel Hospital
Property tax owed: $44,565 (now paid)
How long it was delinquent: Nearly 5 years
What those taxes could buy: 8,913 cans of tennis balls for Portland Parks & Recreation summer programs
Why it was delinquent: Miscommunication
One name on the delinquency list immediately caught our eye: Legacy Emanuel Hospital, which is part of Portland-based Legacy Health.
We drove by the address—even more puzzling. The building is the gleaming Randall Children’s Hospital, whose cheery symbol, a red and blue kite, has since 2012 lit up the North Portland night sky northeast of the Fremont Bridge.
It didn’t make sense: As a nonprofit, Legacy is generally exempt from property taxes, and for those properties where it might owe taxes, Legacy has lots of money: $2.5 billion in revenue last year.
Legacy spokesman Ryan Frank, once a crack investigative reporter at The Oregonian, dug into the mystery upon our inquiry. Frank soon came back with an answer: “Fresenius Kidney Care leased about 1,400 square feet of space where they served both Legacy patients and non-Legacy patients between 2012 and 2018,” Frank tells WW. “The Multnomah County assessor determined that Fresenius, a for-profit company, was responsible for paying property taxes on the leased space because they saw non-Legacy patients. The lease with Fresenius ended in 2018. However, no one told the county.”
Since 2018, the county has mailed tax bills to Fresenius in Texas, but nothing came back. Legacy never saw the bills, Frank says, and so didn’t know there were taxes owed.
To its credit, Legacy immediately paid the bill after WW contacted the nonprofit. “We will be consulting with Multnomah County to determine if we qualify for an exemption for the 2018 to 2022 tax years,” Frank says.