Joel Swider: Hello, and welcome to the Health Care Real Estate Advisor podcast. I’m Joel Swider an attorney with Hall Render, the largest healthcare-focused law firm in the country. Our guest today is Neil Eicher, who is vice president of government affairs with the New Jersey Hospital Association. We’re going to be discussing legislation that was recently signed into law to restore property tax exemptions for nonprofit hospitals in New Jersey, but which also requires nonprofit hospitals to pay certain community service contribution payments, which we’ll get into in more detail. Neil, welcome back to the podcast.

Neil Eicher: Thank you, Joel. Thank you for having me and you guys do great work on this issue, so I appreciate being a part of it.

Joel Swider: Well, thanks Neil. So before we can understand and appreciate the text of the bill itself, that was recently signed into law, I think it would be helpful to explore some brief background of hospital tax exemptions in New Jersey. I think that there’s really a broader applicability here in other States where we’ve seen the gradual chipping away of property tax exemptions for nonprofit hospitals. And so I think the process is in some ways, just as important as the result, particularly for those who are looking at this case and who’ve been watching it as we have from other States looking to see what that’s going to look like in New Jersey in the future and how it might be translated or mistranslated in other States and other contexts. So, Neil, could you give us a little bit of a lay of the land? What did the landscape look like pre Morristown, which was the case that really sort of brought this issue to a head in 2015?

Neil Eicher: Yeah, sure thing. So the Morristown Memorial hospital tax court decision was a pivotal moment for the industry. As you said in summer of 2015, it’s sort of unexpected rolling from one tax court judge in New Jersey, challenging Morristown p