Healthcare: Scottsdale Healthcare seeks rezoning for campus
Scottsdale Healthcare wants to rezone its downtown medical campus to accommodate a 20-year development plan that includes two patient towers, a new main entrance and additional parking and medical offices.
The hospital is seeking a special campus zoning for a 44.6-acre site northwest of Osborn Road and Drinkwater Boulevard.
It would allow the Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Medical Center to build up to 120 feet at the center of the campus and 75 feet on the perimeter.
An eight-story west tower would add 247 patient beds. The hospital is licensed for 337 beds, spokesman Keith Jones said.
“This is road map for planning for the next 20 years,” said Jones, adding that there is no immediate plan to add the patient tower.
Expansion will depend on demand for new facilities, he said.
Scottsdale Healthcare, the city’s largest employer with 6,555 workers, has been an anchor of downtown redevelopment and continues to expand. It acquired the former Scottsdale Main Post Office last summer and razed the building earlier this year.
Much of the development will be upward.
“It is more efficient and effective to move patients vertically within a building to deliver time-sensitive health care than it is to move across a spread-out building or other buildings on campus,” according to the hospital’s rezoning request.
Height has been a divisive issue downtown with recent commercial projects. It’s not clear if opposition will surface to the hospital’s patient towers.
“I hope not,” zoning attorney John Berry said. “I think everybody recognizes this is a unique situation and the hospital has unique operating characteristics.”
The hospital’s proposal for its medical campus conforms to the city’s new downtown plan, Berry added.
In addition to new buildings, Scottsdale Healthcare’s plan is designed to make the area more pedestrian-friendly.
Pedestrian crossings are included on Osborn Road and Drinkwater Boulevard, including a possible plaza over Drinkwater that would provide a link between the hospital and Scottsdale Stadium to the east.
A traffic light would be added at Fourth Street and Drinkwater and a traffic roundabout would be built at Brown Avenue and Fourth.
The hospital also wants the city to abandon a section of Wells Fargo Avenue north of Fourth Street.
The hospital’s medical campus is bounded by Scottsdale Road, Second Street, Drinkwater Boulevard and Osborn Road, with a parcel southwest of Osborn and Drinkwater.
Scottsdale Healthcare intends to build a new main entrance and visitor lobby on the north side of the hospital. The current entrance on Fourth Street is so nondescript that it is marked with 3-foot-high letters to ensure that visitors can find their way into the hospital.
Jones, the spokesman, said construction of the new entrance and patient tower has been pushed back several years to at least 2013.
The Scottsdale Planning Commission will review the hospital’s rezoning request before making a recommendation to the City Council.
No date has been set for the commission to hear the matter.
by Peter Corbett for The Arizona Republic
