Hospital continues negotiations on new site

Design plans for a new hospital in Libby are moving forward this week while negotiations on its location are ongoing.

Officials from St. John’s Lutheran Hospital are meeting with CTA Architects Engineers and general contractor Swank Enterprises to discuss preliminary design schemes.

“We will go over departmental layouts, the functional plan of various departments, and get down to room-by-room layouts and adjacencies,” CTA project manager Jason Butler said.

Butler is working on the first phase in design and said he is still six to eight months away from finalizing the building’s blueprints.

Meanwhile, the hospital is quietly continuing its pursuit of land for the new location.

“The land in question has been appraised, and the owners will be meeting soon to review that report,” said Bill Patten, St. John’s Lutheran Hospital chief executive officer. “Then we can get the final terms regarding purchasing the land.”

Patten was hesitant to predict how soon the meeting would occur.

“I announced to the hospital staff that, ‘In two days, I will be able to tell you (the new hospital’s location),’ and that was a month ago,” Patten said. “At this point, I’ve stopped predicting. I’m just waiting until I have more information.”

Patten maintains that the secrecy surrounding the possible location of the hospital is “out of respect for the current owners” so they aren’t “subject to scrutiny” from the public.

And if the hospital and landowners don’t come to an agreement?

“This is the location we want,” Patten said. “There are other parcels of land that we can explore that we have done preliminary ‘what ifs’ for, but we have no appraisals or formal negotiations on other land.”

Design plans will continue without a definite location, as shifts in the economy have given the project a sense of urgency. Though construction inflation has eased, financing costs are rising, Patten said.

In addition, as a federally-designated critical access hospital, St. John’s is relying heavily on federal dollars for construction – funding that might disappear in the future.

“We get about 50 cents on the dollar because we’re critical access,” Patten said. “Our concern is that given the challenge that the federal government is facing, they might change these rules.”