HP: Could you go over your master plan for the expansion?
Monroe: Part of the project involved the hospital doing some soul searching to figure out if they were going to be prepared for the 21st Century. They had looked at alternate sites in the Stamford area and decided to say where they are and where they have been for about the last hundred years. The campus was just under 20 acres and we needed between 30 and 50 acres to be able to build a campus that would last for the next 50 years or so.
The hospital has acquired a number of properties contiguous to the campus. Most are residential and they started by tearing them down to make way for the new construction that is coming up. We now have a campus that is just a bit over 30 acres. The hospital building is almost the centerpiece. There are three basic items that are going to go into the next 15 years. One is the specialty building that will be completed in three phases. The second is a Central Utility Plant or CUP. The third is a new parking garage. The CUP needs to be done first. What we’re going to do is run our utilities from the current hospital building that runs to an existing utility plant. We have to build a new CUP and reroute the utilities to that building to do our tie overs. After we do that, then we can start the construction on the ‘Specialty Building’.
The structure of the ‘Specialty Building’ will be done in two phases. Phase I will include the CUP, various landscaping elements and also the buildings first five floors. The only thing that will be built out in the first five floors is the new emergency department which will fill up, what we are calling, ‘the ground floor’. On top floors will be a mechanical/electrical interstitial space. Phase II of construction will fill out the rest of shell that we built under Phase I. That will include cardiovascular institute, new ICU areas, as well as new OR’s and various support services for all the new facilities that are going in there.
Phase III of the construction will complete the ‘Specialty Building’ adding about six more floors to it, which will function as ‘the bed tower’. It will consist of approximately 250 beds. The beds that are in our existing main building will be moved to the new ‘bed tower’. We have to to define what will happen with the space that will remain in the current main building. Along the way we will be demolishing some of the older buildings on the campus as we move those services out of them, such as the Emergency Department, The South Building, and the existing Professional Office Building. Those are probably three of the older structures on campus.
A Medical Office Building that will be done by a private developer on campus, will be a combination of doctors offices and a parking garage. That will hopefully be completed somewhere around the same time Phase 1 is completed but we haven’t chosen a developer yet, nor have we set a schedule.
HP: Who do you have as consultants now for this pre-construction phase.
Monroe: The architects are WHR out of Houston. The Engineers for the mechanical, electrical and plumbing are BR+A out of New York and Boston offices. The Structural Engineers are Walter Moore out of Houston. The Landscaping consultant is Dirt Works out of New York. The pre-construction contractor that has been working with us is Skanska USA out of New Haven, CT and Parsipinee, NJ.
HP: How have you approached the sustainability?
Monroe: We are going to go for LEED Silver. Our President, Brian Grisler has committed to that. We’re hoping that we might be able to stretch it upwards to LEED Gold. But we’re busy counting points, so it all depends on how that goes once we submit for certification. We are going to attain LEED Silver. That has been our commitment and our goal. We have green roofs on the building. A couple of them will be available either for staff and patient access. We’re going to have a green roof on the parking garage when that is built at the end of Phase III. We’re doing rain gardens outside of the building. We’re using open faced, aqua-lock type pavers through parts of the parking lot to make sure that we have open drainage without adding to the storm water content of the city. We’re putting in micro-turbine generators in the central utility plant in order to generate some of our own electricity. We’ve had a lighting consultant to make sure that the campus lighting meets required LEED specifics. Once things are up and running, we’re going to be closely monitoring what we’re doing to make sure that we are, indeed, conserving energy.
HP: What kind of time line do you have?
Monroe: Right now, the time line is kind of open. We just went to our first meeting with the zoning board for the city of Stamford. It was a good meeting. We came out with positive feelings, which continues and which we expect to continue until our next meeting. We hope to wrap this up during the summer. Part of the project is that we’re acquiring three new streets for the campus. One of which will remain open and will just become a street on campus while the other two will remain partially closed so that we can build on them. That will require additional negotiations with the city. We’re looking to possibly start construction, late fall. Hopefully no later than early spring of 2011.
Stamford Hospital and the Stamford Community
“We’ve worked really closely with our community partners and neighbors to keep them abreast of what is going on'” said Scott Orstad, Manager, Corporate Communications in addressing the importance of community relations with Stamford Hospital’s plans. “We’re on the West side of Stamford and we’re part of the revitalization of that section of town. Because of the efforts of the hospital, the town is seeing that it could be advantageous to the area. We’re just outside of downtown Stamford, which is robust city with a lot of international corporations based there. Just up the street, the West side is one of the more tired sections of the community that needs rejuvenation.”
Orstad went on to say, “There are many in the community that have responded very favorable to the fact that the hospital wanted to stay there and be apart of that revitalization. We’ve worked very closely with the neighborhood associations as well as the West Side organization, by keeping them in the loop and getting their feed back on the process.
We also have a strong relationship with a community partner called, Charter Oak Communities, which is also known as the housing authority in Stamford. They have helped to take down housing that was less than attractive and rebuild it to make it mixed-use housing both for people that can afford it as well as making affordable housing options available to people as well.
To make both of our projects successful, we have formed these relationships over the last several years and it was key because we both needed property that the other one owned. For example, to expand part of the footprint of the hospital, to the 30 acres, there’s is a housing project which Charter Oak currently runs, that they were in the middle of demolition, we were able to give them other land to expand their property to rebuild on, so that we could have that piece of the footprint to add to ours. It’s been a very beneficial relationship for both organizations. ”
Master Plan Highlights
* The first phase of plan features the construction of the first 5 stories of a new multi-level Specialty Healthcare Building with public amenities and a pedestrian walkway connecting it to the current Hospital.
* Phase One also includes construction of a new, $25 million Central Utility Plant for energy generation and conservation. The total cost of Phase One is approximately $225 million.
* In Phase One, the new Emergency Department more than doubles the number and size of exam rooms to accommodate today’s technology and the new guidelines endorsed by the American College of Emergency Physicians. It will also have separate adult and pediatric services.
* Phase Two includes build out of the shell space constructed in Phase One on a schedule determined by the availability of financial resources.
* Phase Three, the final phase of the facility plan, features the long-term goal (10-15 years) of vertically expanding the new Specialty Building to create a bed-tower to house medical and surgical beds in the future.