WWW arkcity.net

By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer

A plan by local doctors to build a replacement hospital for Arkansas City is headed for approval, which is expected to come at a special meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall. City Commissioners say a part of an agreement that will cost the city $500,000 should not get in the way.

As part of the deal, the city will assume the current hospital's debt. Extending water and sewer service, at a cost of $950,000 is also included.

The hospital's debt is for a heating and air conditioning system that will remain in the current hospital building, which the city will still own.

"The feeling is that we need a new hospital," City Commissioner Wayne Short said. "It is the hope that those (costs the city would assume) wouldn't raise taxes. Our taxes are high enough."

The $500,000 debt is the only debt on the current hospital building at Birch Avenue and First Street. It stems from the revamping of the hospital's heating and air-conditioning system, a project started in 2000, city and hospital officials said.

A provision states that the city would take responsibility for the reuse of the existing hospital facility. It would pay the remaining bond debt for the heating and air-conditioning project, known as the Johnson Controls HVAC system.

"That's part of our existing agreement to lease the current hospital to the board of trustees," City Manager Curt Freeland said. "That agreement has been in place since the 1970s."

South Central Kansas Regional Medical Center has been making annual payments on the bond issued by the city for the HVAC system, said Clayton Pappan, SCKRMC marketing director. The payments were rolled into the hospital's annual lease payments, he said.

The city owns the SCKRMC facility, built in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Freeland said.

Mayor Joel Hockenbury said the city would try to recover the cost of the debt for the HVAC work from the next tenant of the building.

"Hopefully, another tenant would buy it," he said. "That half million dollars' worth of renovated building is really the only debt on the (current) hospital. We would try to recover that cost."

Hockenbury said the city was getting ready to put a panel together to find a new use for the hospital.

The nearly $1 million cost of extending water and sewer lines to the new hospital, which would be built two miles north of the city, west of U.S. 77, had already been approved by the city for the Department of Housing and Urban Development project, Hockenbury said.

That $25 million project to build a new Ark City hospital was turned down by HUD last year in a disagreement over what type of hospital would be built. SCKRMC wanted a full-service hospital, but HUD said the hospital should be a critical access hospital with restrictions on the type of care provided.

"The engineering work on (extending the water and sewer lines) already is done and paid off," he said.

Short said he anticipates that the extended water and sewer lines would be used not only by the new hospital, but later by other commercial facilities built near the hospital. They might include doctors' offices, clinics, dentists' offices, pharmacies and perhaps a restaurant.

"That could be very feasible," Short said. "If this (new hospital) does bring other things to that area, that's more income to the city without the mill levy going up."