Diane Adler of Bates and Associates gave an update on progress for renovating Eureka Springs Hospital at the March 19 meeting, saying that while interviewing hospital staff, they discovered 119 pages of old documents including plans for the hospital. “At least we won’t be starting from scratch,” she told commissioners.
Adler said Work Effort 1 is substantially complete, by which she meant she and her team had toured every department and gathered information about functions and operations of the facility from staff and administration.
In Work Effort 2 they will consider demographics of who uses the hospital and why, and look at the flow of patients to develop a design that uses available space efficiently. She noted, for example, a radiology patient now might have to go to three different rooms.
The result of this research will be creating three different concepts with phasing and budgets attached for commissioners’ review. There might be hybrid versions, but the end product will depend on the budget available. Certainties include an upgrade of the appearance of the facility and a reorganization of space that makes more sense.
Architect Tom Johnson considered the final phase like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. Another task will be identifying which trees might have to be removed and presenting that request to the Planning Commission. Mention was made of using harvested lumber in the new facility.
Land purchase
Chair Michael Merry announced the purchase of three lots adjacent to the ESH property closed Feb. 28, at a final cost of $141,596,42. Commissioner Barbara Dicks said city council passed all three readings and the Emergency Clause of an ordinance supporting the purchase, so the property now belongs to the city but must be used for hospital purposes as long as the city owns it, and it can be included in designs for renovating the hospital.
Organizing
Dicks reported she has been collecting copies of documents at city hall related to commission business through the years, lamenting that commissioners do not have much historical documentation to refer to or learn from. She found, for example, a copy of a two-year lease for the 25 Norris St. property from the 1990s that had been missing. She said the city owned property was leased by the commission, but subsequent related documents are still missing.
Dicks said she would begin organizing the material and depositing it in a Dropbox account so all commissioners would have access. She pointed out the commission just made the land purchase, and future commission might need the documents related to that. Commissioner Suzanne Tourtelot committed to helping Dicks ferret through city files to find more related material.
Next meeting will be Monday, April 16, at 12:30 p.m., at ECHO Clinic.