Talks begin for new hospital site
Public won’t learn the chosen location for state-of-the-art facility for several more months
Grand River Hospital and St. Mary’s General Hospital have narrowed the search for the site for a new hospital in Kitchener-Waterloo and have begun negotiations with the owners of two separate properties.
This latest step narrows the selection down to two sites — a preferred one and an alternate — from three that were shortlisted last December, the hospitals announced Friday.
The public won’t learn the chosen site for the new, state-of-the-art hospital for several more months.
“To ensure a fair negotiation process, the site locations and landowners will not be shared until land has been secured. It is expected negotiations may occur over several months,” the hospitals said in the announcement.
Negotiations to buy the land are now underway, and include completing due diligence and discussions with the landowners of both sites, the announcement said.
The proposal, which has not yet received approval or funding from the Ministry of Health, would redevelop Grand River, Freeport and St. Mary’s hospitals and build a new facility of almost 1,000 beds. The new hospital is expected to cost billions of dollars and open in about 10 years. The redeveloped hospitals will serve a total of two million residents in a catchment area that extends as far north as Tobermory.
The site selection panel recommended a preferred site and an alternate site to the boards of Grand River Hospital, St. Mary’s General Hospital, and St. Joseph’s Health System. All three boards approved the recommendations in April.
Selection criteria included a site of at least 50 acres (20.2 hectares) that can accommodate a helipad; proximity to densely populated areas; easy access to roads and transit as well as to other services and amenities.
A call for proposals last fall yielded five proposals for potential sites,
which the site selection panel narrowed to three last December. A group of technical experts, including environmental experts, planning professionals, lawyers, engineers and Indigenous community members, then reviewed the shortlisted proposals.
All three sites were then ranked by individual site selection panel members with a total score provided for each site. The two sites with the highest scores were put forward as the preferred and alternate sites.
Now that the selection is down to two sites, “we can do our technical due diligence to make sure it meets all of our requirements,” said Cliff Harvey, vice-president of redevelopment for Grand River and St. Mary’s. That means looking at the actual sites and how that will shape the proposal that goes to the Ministry of Health.
“Now that we know the site, we know the planning setbacks; we know the height limitations on the site; we know what utilities are available; we know the roads,” Harvey said.
Negotiating simultaneously on two different sites saves time, said Kara Weiler, a spokesperson for Building the Future of Care Together, the joint group behind the hospital project. Side-by-side negotiations allow the project to proceed, should talks with the owners of one site founder, she said.
That process was outlined in the original request for proposals, so anyone who put in a land proposal was “aware that we would go through the negotiations with the two sites,” Harvey said.
Friday’s announcement “is a stepwise milestone to get to that final site and move to the next stage of planning,” he said.
The project hopes to announce the chosen site this fall, as well as funding from the province, after which work will begin on detailed plans for space requirements, staffing and equipment needs, and costs.