Beam Ceremony Tops Off St. E's Project
BOARDMAN, Ohio -- The new $100 million tower being built at St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center should be completed and in use about a year from now.
Construction of the 165,000-square-foot project is both on time and “a bit under budget,” reported Genie Aubel, president of the Boardman hospital. “So that makes us very happy,” she said. Construction began in October.
About 80 health system employees and administrators, guests and media representatives attended a topping-off ceremony Monday afternoon, enduring an early-spring snow as ironworkers put in place the final steel beam in the newest section of the building.
“We still have a great deal of work yet to go” but Monday’s ceremony represented a “major” event in the project, said Bob Shroder, president and chief executive officer of Humility of Mary Health Partners.
The project will add 72 medical surgical/telemetry beds, six intensive care beds, 12 labor and delivery beds, 32 post-partum beds and a 24-bed neonatal intensive care unit operated by Akron Children’s Hospital. The first phase of the project is expected to open in early April 2014, when four additional operating rooms will come online, bringing the total there to 10. At the same time, obstetrics, maternity, nursery and Akron Children’s neonatal ICU will relocated from St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown.
“We built and opened this facility in 2007 and the utilization of this hospital has exceeded our most optimistic projections,” Shroder remarked. “Because of that we’ve run into capacity problems where we haven’t had enough beds. So with this expansion we will hopefully lessen those capacity issues.”
“We’ve been very fortunate here in Boardman. We’ve been very well received by the community and as such sometimes the demand for our services and our building” has exceeded its capacity, Aubel agreed.
The expansion at Boardman will also take off some of the demand at the downtown Youngstown campus, providing more flexibility to move forward with a planned renovation there to convert to all private rooms, Shroder and Aubel said.
Construction on the tower project has gone well so far, said Chris Freitag, project manager with Shook KBJ Construction. Shook Construction Co. is based out of Dayton and KBJ Inc. of Cleveland is Shook’s minority joint-venture partner on the project.
“The architects at Strollo Architects are very good to work with and our construction team and subcontractors have been very good to work with so far,” he said.
“Any time you’re tying into an existing building there’s going to be challenges,” he acknowledged. “We’re actually building six floors on top of an existing surgery space and occupied patient rooms so that’s been quite a challenge to keep the noise down and keep all the water out as we’re working above.”
Nearly all of the labor involved with the 340,000-manhour project is local and more than 70% of the materials used in its construction is sourced locally as well, said Dr. Betty Jo Licata, dean of Youngstown State University’s Williamson College of Business Administration, representing the Humility of Mary board of trustees. “Projects like this not only serve our community once they’re completed but they also serve our community” by boosting the local economy and supporting area businesses and workers.
While the initial phase of the project is slated to be in use a year from now, the three additional medical surgery floors will open “as capacity fills up” over the next few years, Shroder said. “It could be that we do a floor a year. It could be that we do all three floors in the first year,” he predicted.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.