St. Luke’s maps out its future one step at time

The future of St. Luke’s Health System over the next 30 years and beyond is coming one step at a time.

The latest step was submitting a draft master plan Oct. 17 to the city of Boise, which has 45 days to submit comments to St. Luke’s.

This draft took the “puzzle pieces” from the preliminary draft in May and positioned them on a piece of paper. The exact appearance of new buildings will take shape in the coming year.

St. Luke’s will take city comments and submit a revised draft in mid-December. After that, city staff will prepare recommendations for public hearings in the spring by the Boise Planning and Zoning Commission and the Boise City Council.

“We’re now on a pathway, hopefully, where we can get more specific on design and what comes first,” said Kathy Moore, St. Luke’s regional CEO. “Really, it’s the road map.”

The draft master plan calls for first building a children’s pavilion, which would serve as an outpatient services companion to St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital.

The plan also roughly outlines a new central power plant and parking garage, expanding the Children’s Hospital, and expanding St. Luke’s to the north, along Fort Street, with integrated outpatient clinics and physician offices. The main hospital tower now in use will be modernized and renovated, with the renovation of critical care units, labor and delivery, the emergency department, operating suites, and the addition of about 60 patient rooms.

The master plan calls for adding 680,000 square feet to St. Luke’s at a projected cost of $300 million to $400 million.

“We’re not going to complete the whole project in the next 10 years, probably not even in 20 years,” Moore said.

Timelines for specific construction projects and schematic drawings for proposed buildings  will be developed once the plan’s approval process with the city and Ada County Highway District is complete.

Between the filing of the preliminary draft in May and this draft master plan, St. Luke’s went out into the neighborhood to get public input. St. Luke’s conducted 10 open houses involving neighborhood associations. Some were focused on specific subjects such as historic preservation and bicycle access. Construction will close a block of Jefferson Street.

“We took a lot of their input. We revised some of the bicycle planning,” Moore said.

Public input also convinced St. Luke’s to relinquish its master lease on the mostly empty One Eleven Broadway strip shopping center, which the hospital had planned to use as temporary relocation space as various sections of the hospital are under construction.

“We were unaware of the angst around the location and the loss of food services at that location,” Moore said. “The property owner now has the ability to develop the center.”