New Apopka hospital to open doors next month
City’s west side likely to boom, mayor says
Florida Hospital will open its newest medical campus next month and, with it, most likely the doors to an economic boom on the west side of Apopka.
“The hospital is going to be a magnet for economic development,” Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer said during a preview tour of the new sevenstory Florida Hospital Apopka on Ocoee-Apopka Road.
Situated near State Road 429, the $203 million hospital — replacing the current aging hospital on North Park Avenue — will bring new medical services to Apopka and transform the way outsiders think of the city, the mayor said.
It also figures to change the surrounding acres.
The 2-mile stretch of Ocoee-Apopka Road from the S.R. 429 toll road to Marden
Road is mostly vacant now, but it is primed for growth unlike anything Orange County’s second-largest city has seen in the past decade. The city drafted a special zoning district called East Shore that includes the hospital’s 33-acre campus and emphasizes walkable but high-intensity mixed-use development.
“We’re going to see the full complement of restaurants and shops and other commercial opportunities that we see around all hospitals,” Kilsheimer said.
The 120-bed hospital is replacing a historic medical facility with 50 beds that opened in 1967 under the name of North Orange Memorial Hospital.
The new hospital has an emergency department that has 30,000 square feet, about five times larger than the one at the current hospital.
The hospital will employ about 700 people — almost three times the number of nurses and other workers who staff the health system’s current Apopka site, administrator Tim Cook said.
“This facility really represents a new era,” Cook said.
He said the hospital boasts 20 intensive-care beds and four operating rooms and is likely to add another 80 beds in the next two years. Surgeries have not been performed at the current Apopka hospital, but those medical procedures will be available at the new one.
“The last 40, 50 years, if someone would come to the emergency room with appendicitis or a gall bladder problem, they would be actually put in an ambulance and sent down to one of other hospitals to have surgery, which is a major inconvenience, more costly,” Cook said.
The medical campus also is expected to draw physicians who were reluctant to establish a practice near the current site, which lacked space.
“Physicians … want to be able to see how they’re going to be able to build their business,” the mayor said.
“The Park Avenue location where the old Florida Hospital Apopka … just wasn’t that attractive to physicians. This new location with the highway immediately adjacent to this campus … is showing doctors they’re going to be able to come to Apopka and grow their practice.”
Florida Hospital has not finalized plans for the Park Avenue site but likely will include a senior-living component, a spokesman said.
The new site, less than a mile from a toll-road exit and less than five minutes from downtown Apopka, also will be attractive to developers.
“The majority of people who own land around there, I think, realize they’re sitting on a gold mine,” community development director Jim Hitt said. “Hopefully, they won’t ask for too much gold to develop their properties … because it needs to get rolling.”
Hitt said no development applications have been submitted yet for any land parcels near the hospital. But there have been plenty of inquiries.
“It’s taking off with the hospital going in,” he said.
One venture under discussion is a commercialresidential mix near Keene Road and OcoeeApopka Road, a site close to the S.R. 429 exit ramp and about half a mile from the hospital’s main entrance. Other nearby properties include a horse farm and an 11-acre nursery.
The city plans to build a fire station nearby.
Not everyone, however, is eager for quick development.
Maria Santee and Madeline Spencer, residents of Emerson Park, a 400-home subdivision with an entrance on Ocoee-Apopka Road on the opposite side of the hospital, may welcome the new medical facility, but they’re wary of the traffic it likely will funnel through their neighborhood.
The residential neighborhood, which has a back entrance on Marden Road, is often used as a cutthrough to the expressway.
The women asked the Apopka City Council this month to either fix their roads, which were privately built, or pay to install gates at the entrances to prevent short-cutters from ruining their roads.