WWW arkcity.net

By FOSS FARRAR
Staff Writer

Construction on the replacement hospital for Arkansas City may start within 60 days, a hospital spokesman said today.

No other details on the plan to begin construction were available this morning. Calls to several people involved in the new hospital project were not answered by press time.

Dr. Dirk Smith made the announcement, "We're 60 days out before construction begins" on the new hospital, said Clayton Pappan, director of marketing for South Central Kansas Regional Medical Center. The comment was made at a strategic planning meeting on Wednesday,

The new hospital, CoVista Medical Center, would replace the city-controlled South Central Kansas Regional Medical Center, located at First Street and Birch Avenue.

CoVista would be jointly owned by Midwest Healthcare Alliance, a local doctors' group, and Cardiovascular Hospitals of America, a Wichita-based organization that builds hospitals.

The new hospital site is two miles north of town, just west of U.S. 77.

The land where it will be built has been annexed by the city.

A lease agreement for farming part of the new hospital site property is about to be renewed, SCKRMC officials and the farmer who now works the property said today.

The cash-rent agreement is $15 an acre on the south area of the site where building will not be done initially, said Pam Jackson, SCKRMC chief financial officer. Rent for the other part where the building will be erected is $35 an acre.

Delbert Bryant said he has farmed the land for nearly 20 years.

"I farm the part they aren't building on," Bryant said today. The new hospital will be built on 26 acres on the north part of the property.

Bryant said he has planted wheat on 132 acres bordering the plot for the new building. This area may be developed later.

Community leaders and hospital officials broke ground north of Ark City at the site of the new CoVista Medical Center on a rainy Friday afternoon, April 28.

Some ground work on the new hospital began and was on schedule, a SCKRMC spokesman said in late August.