UNMH to give county an update on tower project

First phase will include demolition, rebuilding of parking garage

Knocking down the University of New Mexico Hospital parking garage and building a new one will be the first phase of what is expected to be a five-year effort to build a new hospital tower.

Several details are becoming more clear for the long-awaited project, which hospital officials said will help modernize the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the state and bring the hospital’s patient capacity in line with national benchmarks. Kate Becker, the CEO of UNM Hospitals, is scheduled to give the Bernalillo County Commission an update on the proposal Tuesday night as part of UNMH’s regular quarterly updates to the county commission.

A site has been selected. The new

tower will be on 6.7 acres west of the current hospital just north of Lomas. The hospital’s parking garage is in that space. So the first construction phase will be demolishing that garage and building a new one with about 2,500 spaces northeast of a roundabout near Lomas and Yale, said Mike Chicarelli, the chief operating officer at UNMH.

“Parking can be a challenge here. So we’re going to have to build a new parking structure before we take that down. So really the new structure is the first thing that will happen in terms of groundbreaking,” he said.

That may not start until August of next year, said Mark Rudi, a spokesman for the hospital. Chicarelli said the current estimate is that the entire project won’t be done and ready for patients until October 2024.

But planning how to design and finance the hospital tower is underway.

Construction alone for the project is expected to cost $385 million, according to UNM documents.

Documents scheduled to be presented to the Bernalillo County Commission Tuesday show that UNMH expects to finance the project using a combination of cash reserves, capital appropriations and a $320 million loan insured by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The parking garage will use $45 million in cash reserves. The university hospital also plans to seek $30 million in state appropriations, according to county documents.

No one from UNMH was available to discuss the hospital tower’s funding plans Monday.

The documents show that while UNMH officials don’t expect to receive final HUD approval until early 2021, UNMH officials in September had a “HUD introductory meeting” and they are taking steps to ensure approval by moving forward with a feasibility study that requires certain construction documents and cost estimates. The federal agency will provide mortgage insurance for hospitals in some cases that can help keep interest costs low for construction projects, according to HUD’s website.

Last February, UNM regents voted on several design aspects of the project. The university hired companies for the program management services and architectural design planning.

A new, more modern hospital has been in the works for years. In 2012, a proposal to build a facility was before the state Board of Finance but a vote was never taken.

Hospital officials have said the tower will help improve the hospital’s capacity for treating patients as well as make the facility more modern.

“We’re working in a building that was built in 1954. The (operating room equipment) has changed in terms of care delivery since them,” Chicarelli said. “The rooms are small and very crowded and the amount of equipment in an operating room is drastically different” than in the 1950s.

UNMH is also regularly above national benchmarks in terms of the number of patients it treats. Dr. Paul Roth, chancellor of the UNM Health Sciences Center, has previously said that UNMH will deny about 1,000 patient transfers from hospitals around the state each year.

Chicarelli said national standards call for hospitals to stay at about 85% of capacity but UNMH is regularly above 95%.

“Generally, the rule of thumb for hospitals is somewhere around 85% (capacity),” he said. “That allows you to be able to move patients around to different units more efficiently.”

Once completed, the tower will have 96 inpatient beds designed to care for patients in intensive care, 18 operating rooms, more than 40 exam rooms and also space for MRIs and other diagnostic treatments offered at UNMH, among other additions. And the layout of those rooms will be done in a thoughtful manner, Chicarelli said.

“We want to have the interventional suites near the critical care,” he said. “The idea is to be able to deliver the diagnostic services to the critical care patients so we’re not moving them from one building to the next.”