The new Oregon State Hospital annex in Junction City will provide relief, but not only for its patients, according to Kevin Watson, the city’s administrator.

“When the RV companies came to town, we had some big jobs … but luxury RVs aren’t really selling like they used to,” he said. “Any sort of opportunity that brings jobs, especially for a rural community that’s not as diverse as a bigger community like Portland, is a pretty big deal.”

Construction began last month on the 220,000-square-foot annex, which is expected to provide hundreds of jobs – including some permanent ones – for Junction City, according to city and state officials.

Like many other rural areas in the state, Junction City has suffered as a result of the economic downturn. Big projects like the annex, which could generate more foot traffic for local businesses, are welcome sights, according to Watson.

“Overall, there is a big interest of excitement (from local residents),” he said. “This is probably one of the biggest projects we’ve seen.”

The annex has been in the works for some time. In 2005, the Oregon Department of Human Services began planning to replace the Oregon State Hospital, which the Legislature deemed severely outdated and in poor condition. The DHS proposed to replace it by building two new facilities – one in Salem and one in Junction City.

The Junction City site was chosen because the Oregon Department of Corrections was already putting in needed infrastructure – water, road access and electrical lines – for a new prison and was willing to lease out part of the property for the hospital. However, the better part of a decade has been needed to secure the $458 million for the entire project – including its first phase, the Salem facility.

“It had been back since 2005 since they originally had come up with the game plan for this,” said Jodie Jones, a hospital administrator. “Five years later, we needed to revaluate the project before we could get close to building.”

Now, the annex’s first phase, $2 million of site preparation, is in progress. is expected to begin work in the winter. The company this month will hold an official meeting to inform subcontractors on how to get involved.

With state projects, contractors usually must pick the lowest bidders, which are not always local firms. But Hoffman is encouraging those in the area to team with larger firms to get their foot in the door, according to Jones.

“There are some jobs that are just too big for the small guy to bid on,” she said. “But if they partner up on a larger one, it makes for a really good partnership.”

Also, Hoffman this week is meeting with small businesses in the area to figure out how to incorporate them in the building process, Jones said.

But not everyone is happy about the project being built in Junction City. It will take patients away from their families, according to Chris Bouneff, executive director of the . Instead, he said, the existing hospital should be upgraded.

“The state already has the needed capacity, and its plan is to close that capacity and move it far away from the communities being served,” he said. “It’s a disingenuous project. There are certain politics involved, and it’s very discouraging that families dealing with mental illness are some pawn in a political machine.”

But hospital administrators claim that the existing facility cannot be upgraded to current standards. And Jones pointed out that the annex has decreased the number of beds it’s expected to hold – from 360 to 174 – as a result of mental health care moving away from hospitals and toward a community focus.

Junction City citizens are not getting caught up in the political process, Watson said. Instead, they are waiting for the day when the annex is finally built.

“You got to be optimistic,” he said. “I don’t think its impacts will be ignored, and they’ll hopefully be significant.”

Construction of the annex is expected to finish by late 2014. Its cost is still undetermined; however, the whole project will cost $458 million, and Jones said the hospital has secured $429 million thus far. Officials plan to ask for the Legislature for the remaining $29 million.

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Only a couple of weeks after unveiling its new $250 million children’s hospital, is planning a $25 million renovation to convert vacant pediatric space into adult intensive care units.

A total of 105,000 square feet of space in three hospital buildings – the west wing, the north tower and Emmanuel central – will be gutted and repurposed.

“We conduct state-of-the-art critical care, and we’re matching our facilities to the care we provide,” said Lori Morgan, the hospital’s chief administrative officer. “We’ve been doing 2020 care in 1960s rooms, and it’s been hard.”

On the third floor of the west wing, where the pediatric intensive care unit was, a new ICU for adults will specialize in neurotrama.

The second floor of Emanuel central will be converted from an ICU for infants into a cardiovascular ICU, where patients will be able to regain dexterity in a gym and a kitchen.

In the north tower, another trauma care unit will be built for adults. This will let the hospital’s emergency room expand into the former adult ICU space.

Morgan said new walls will be built, new fixtures will be installed and wiring will be added. Hallways and waiting areas will be reconstructed to accommodate the rooms’ new sizes.

“These rooms have to have a lot of technological requirements in terms of gas hookups and suction – most of our patients are very ill,” she said. “Our mission is not to necessarily make more rooms, but make our existing rooms bigger and better.”

By adding space, Morgan said doctors and patients will have more room to maneuver.

“We do a lot of ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), so patients will be on an ECMO machine and a giant ventilator and their families will want to be in the room with them – there’s just not a lot of space for mobility currently,” she said.

Dave Guthrie of , which is designing the project, said the new fixtures, such as ultra-sensitive lighting and rubber flooring, will make the hospital experience less distressing for patients. Guthrie added that new bathrooms and nourishment stations will be built for the medical staff.

A new waiting room for patients’ families will be built. Unlike the existing waiting room, near the emergency room and the ICUs, this one will be farther from the medical units, giving visitors a quiet place to rest.

“We understand that people spend long durations at the hospital waiting for family members, so we attempted to create a really comfortable living space there,” Guthrie said. “There will be family conference rooms and health care research rooms (attached to the waiting room) with Internet connections for family members to look up whatever medical problems they may be dealing with.”

Guthrie said ZGF and Hoffman Construction, the project’s general contractor, will face a number of challenges once construction begins. Although the rooms are being expanded, ceiling heights will remain the same, so some machinery may not fit easily. Additionally, the hospital will remain in use during the renovation; Guthrie said airflow management will require construction on the building’s mechanical shafts, which connect to air handlers on the roof.

“We’re going to have to break construction down to as many as six phases in order to not disrupt their operations, he said. “It’s been one of the things we’ve been examining closely.”

The first phase of the renovation is set to start on April 2 and finish in about a year, according to Guthrie.

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An effort to ensure that ailing Oregonians receive the appropriate type of health care has changed plans for the new state psychiatric hospital in Junction City.

this week is wrapping up construction in Salem on a 620-bed psychiatric hospital – the first of two that are replacing a 128-year-old facility. But after reassessing what the state’s needs were, members of the Oregon Health Authority decided to cut the number of beds in the second hospital, which will be built in Junction City, in half.

“We took a step back to see what the needs actually were,” said Patricia Feeny, communications manager for the Oregon State Hospital replacement project. “We decided that if we could reduce the geriatric population by getting them into more appropriate settings for dementia or Alzheimer’s rather than a psychiatric facility, we would come up with a different formula.”

Reducing the number of beds from 360 to 174 could mean a smaller contract for Hoffman and the subcontractors in Junction City. St. Louis-based architecture �ھ������� and Portland-based are still working on the schematic design, though, so the impact on the budget and square-footage is still unclear, according to project administrator Linda Hammond.

She added that the team is working to stay as close as possible to the original $458.1 million budget that the Legislature allocated for the hospital replacements.

The infrastructure to support the site has not been changed, according to Parrish Van Wert, project liaison for the state. The 90-acre site in Junction City will also hold two state prisons, so the decision to downsize had less of an impact on the total infrastructure, which cost the state approximately $27 million.

Because the project team is the same for Junction City as in Salem, Bart Eberwein, Hoffman vice president, expects construction to begin smoothly next spring, even if there are changes to the site plans.

“We’re planning on moving a lot of personnel from one site to the other, so there are a lot of lessons learned in terms of constructing for a fragile population,” Eberwein said. “(In Salem) there were a lot of things that were figured out in preconstruction through a lot of collaboration.”

Because some of the work in Salem was next to buildings that still housed patients, Eberwein said the construction team became more aware of the patients’ needs. Unlike the old hospital, which had a ward-based floor plan and employed a stricter model for psychiatric care, the new facilities encourage patients to participate in activities and move around.

“You really want to build something with as much light and civility and potential for social interaction and healing as possible,” he said. “These are easy things to say, but it’s really different when you start to analyze the fixtures and room layouts, and we worked closely with the architects and nursing staff to put together a long list of what we’ve learned.”

The focus on a rehabilitative design is also part of the reason the Oregon Health Authority advised a reduction in the number of beds in Junction City, according to Hammond.

“The design is in line with the plan for continuous patient improvement,” she said. “The bed numbers came down in part because we want to focus on treatment and recovery and getting to the lowest level of care so individuals can be as independent as possible.”

Geriatric patients with Alzheimer’s or dementia will be diverted to community facilities rather than the secure psychiatric hospital.

Hoffman will start wetland mitigation on the greenfield site before construction begins on the facility. Crews next summer will begin to upgrade the intersection of Oregon Route 99 and Mill Iron Road, which will serve as an access point to the facilities, according to Van Wert.

“We only get the chance to do this every 100 years,” Hammond said. “As we look holistically at how we serve this vulnerable population, it’s important to take a step back, ask questions and make changes to get it right.”

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The Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center in Vancouver, Wash., is at the heart of the latest research aimed at helping hospitals rein in their power consumption.

A federally funded study released recently provides a rigorous analysis of how and when Salmon Creek uses energy. Researchers from the University of Washington and Eugene-based conducted an advanced energy modeling study of the hospital’s energy use throughout January 2011. The data provides a new spectrum of information to people working in hospital design and construction, and could help officials hit energy reduction targets.

“There are lots of opinions about how hospitals use energy, but not much actual data to confirm whether that opinion is correct or not,” said Michael Hatten, a SOLARC principal who worked on this study and several related efforts. “This is one of the very first rigorous pieces of objective information available to anyone who wants it.”

The study is part of a larger program aimed at evaluating how to radically reduce energy consumption in hospitals nationwide. The program covers six cities – one for each climate region in the U.S. – and has $1.3 million in funding, primarily from the U.S. Department of Energy and in part from the .

The broader goals for the program are to implement drastic energy-saving strategies in hospitals based on scientific, climate-specific data. But the Salmon Creek study is unique within the program – it was selected for the most in-depth analysis.

The 220-bed hospital, which opened in two phases in 2005 and 2009, already performs better than a typical hospital in the U.S. The facility, designed by and , was selected for the study in part because it had some advanced infrastructure that made the analyses possible.

Several unexpected findings will help direct future energy reduction efforts. Hot water, elevators and imaging equipment such as MRIs all accounted for very small percentages of the hospital’s total energy use.

The biggest energy drain was air-reheating equipment, which accounted for 42.3 percent of the total.

Energy reduction measures were in place already, but Pat Lydon, coordinator of strategic resources for the six hospitals in the Legacy Health system, expects to use the new data to aid its own strategic resource management plans.

“First we get insight into that particular hospital, and then we can extrapolate and assume similarities in other hospitals,” Lydon said. “Once we understand where we are, we can understand which site has (energy reduction) opportunities and then tailor our goals to each site.”

While the data is specific to Legacy’s Salmon Creek clinic, it is expected to have a national impact on the design and construction of hospitals, and retrofits of existing facilities.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is using the study to develop guidelines on how to design and build a hospital that uses less than half the amount of energy consumed by most existing hospitals, according to Hatten.

“Our study makes sure that energy reduction efforts are not going off in the wrong direction based on assumptions that we proved weren’t true,” he said. “The results of this study have really helped tune the larger research to make it relevant.”

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Before Intel started building like crazy in Hillsboro, the new Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel was the largest private construction project happening in the Portland area. ZGF designed and Hoffman is constructing the building, which is now visible from the Fremont Bridge – it’s the one big building in the middle of its neighborhood.

The nine-story, 330,000 square-foot building is well on its way to finished– it should be open in February. And now, thanks to the Internet and marketing budgets, you can take a fly-through tour of a computer-animated model. Check it out:

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The Kaiser Permanente complex under construction in Hillsboro is a testament to high building standards – and to the challenges they can create.

The Westside Medical Center is on track to be certified Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold, but when an installed insulation material was declared illegal in Oregon, the company paid approximately $500,000 to have most of it removed.

Construction firms had bid and agreed to contracts to perform work using materials containing flame retardant chemicals called polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE). They are sometimes used in wrappings and coatings of pipe insulation.

Little is known about the direct effects of PBDEs on human health; however, studies revealed that animals suffered brain damage and other harm after coming into contact with the substances. The Oregon Legislature passed a law to ban three specific PBDEs, effective Jan. 1, 2011.

When manufacturers notified F. Rodgers Corp., an insulation contractor, that the law would force them to halt shipments of certain types of insulation, the company had already installed approximately 12,000 lineal feet of the affected material in the Kaiser facility, as well as some in two dozen other facilities throughout Oregon.

Despite some loopholes that may have allowed installation of material inventoried before Jan. 1, F. Rodgers Corp. chose to avoid any legal gray areas.

“I basically tried to put liability off of myself and my company by simply saying that we couldn’t continue to install this material,” said Gordon Vierck, F. Rodgers project manager.

Kaiser was the only client that asked F. Rodgers to remove the material, Vierck said. F. Rodgers also had installed PBDE insulation in the Legacy Emanuel children’s hospital in Portland, but its owners elected to leave the material in place and use compliant materials moving forward, to meet the new state standards.

Daniel Green, project director for Kaiser, said it decided to go above and beyond state requirements.

“Why would we want to build a brand-new building and leave that stuff in?” he said. “I’m proud of the local doctors and our construction management people, as well as in the headquarters in Oakland for saying we’ll stand tall and pay for this.”

Despite the insulation-related setback, Green said the $350 million project is still on track to finish on time and slightly under budget. After approximately 800,000 man-hours, construction last week reached a milestone: completion of the central utility plant.

The hospital’s entire information technology infrastructure passes through the plant, so it is one of the project’s most complex construction phases. After that component finished, the construction team released 40-50 workers, according to Travis Baker, project director for general contractor Andersen Construction.

“The hospital, nursing tower and medical office building are in the hot and heavy phase of construction now,” Baker said. “And for neighbors and people driving by, we’re almost there with the parking garage – we’ve got one more level to go.”

Baker said the eight-story garage might be the tallest building in Hillsboro, which led the city to work with the project team to help ensure the structure fit into the neighborhood. Curved walls and green screen features on the facade are designed to minimize the building’s scale and soften its impact, especially for residents of the neighboring apartment complex.

“At least efforts have been made to take a big, concrete box and make it look a little less obnoxious,” Baker joked.

Rainwater that hits the 950-car garage will be captured, stored in a tank and then pumped to irrigate plants and fill a landscaped water feature in front of the medical office building.

“It’s not enough rain capture for a LEED point, but it’s the environmentally conscious thing to do,” Green said.

Both Green and Baker emphasized the sensibility of Kaiser’s approach to LEED certification, and cited instances where the company’s decisions reflected values beyond mere point-gathering.

“My personal take on it is that Kaiser does a good job of weighing all of the factors,” Baker said. “They weigh the cost – what’s good for the environment, what’s good for the community – and one thing doesn’t just drive it home. Other clients will just do something for the LEED point and don’t really care if it’s actually a good decision.”

The planned photovoltaic array is not large enough to earn a LEED point, for instance. Nevertheless, the medical center will feature high-efficiency equipment to reduce energy use, and Kaiser will purchase green power from Portland General Electric.

Green explained that Kaiser has its own standards.

“Before LEED existed,” he said, “Kaiser pushed for the cradle-to-grave history on the products (it) bought – on carpeting, paint, upholstery for furniture. And we said, ‘Get the toxic material out of the products or we won’t buy them from you.’ ”

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An expansion of the Bay Area Hospital building in Coos Bay will create a new wing on the 40-year-old building, allowing for modern upgrades and a better patient and staff experience.

Though the expansion, designed by , will add 110,000 square feet to the building, the hospital is not planning to expand patient capacity, said ZGF project manager Malcolm Brown. Instead, the new facility is part of a transition to offer more private rooms at the hospital.

“The rooms (in the expansion) are much larger than in the existing facility,” Brown said. “There is additional room in the patient rooms for family.”

The presence of family has been showing to improve patient outcome, Brown said.

The expansion project adds on to the existing three-story building, and will improve the layout of the facility, which has been hampered by a sloped site with entrances on both the first and third floors.

“We tried to address the way-finding issue by creating a multilevel atrium space that will allow people to arrive in a single location and get oriented,” Brown said.

The exterior of the building was designed to conform to the existing building, but will add large bay windows in patient rooms.

“Being on the coast, it’s important to bring in as much natural light as possible,” Brown said. “And there are real pretty trees on and around the setting.”

To take optimum advantage of the new natural light, the building will have sensor-controlled low-energy lighting.

The new facility will also be integrated with the existing building through a pneumatic tube system that will carry supplies, medications and lab samples through the building. The buildings will have independent systems, however, because the new facility is designed to modern seismic standards for essential facilities, meaning that it will still be usable after an earthquake. The old part of the building was constructed before such codes were in place.

Hoffman Construction Company is the general contractor on the project.  Other members of the design team include HGE Inc., KPFF Consulting Engineers Inc., Interface Engineering Inc. and Anderson Krygier Inc.

The ZGF project team included Karl Sonnenberg, partner in charge; John Thompson, principal designer; Barbara Anderson, program and operations analysis; Solvei Neiger, medical planner; Sharron van der Meulen, principal interior designer and program verification; Scott Tarrant, project architect; and Lee Kilbourn, David Grigsby, Paul Evans, Julia Bannon, Michael Perso, Rena Simon, Maria McMorran, Amy Piasek-Kluge and Justin Brooks.

“On the Boards” is a weekly feature that spotlights local firms’ best design work. Submissions from architectural and engineering firms are encouraged. Please email ontheboards@djcOregon.com or call 503-802-7240.

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PeaceHealth officials earlier this week asked state administrators to let them wait six additional months before beginning construction of a $73 million project at its Sacred Heart University District campus in downtown Eugene.

If granted by the state, the delay would be the fifth – all for financial reasons – for the project that was originally slated to begin in summer 2008. But administrators at the health organization said past delays have helped the project, and they expect this one to do the same.

PeaceHealth needs state administrative approval for a construction extension because the organization has an agreement with the state to provide its services, and some state oversight is required because it relates to health care. PeaceHealth officials have submitted the paperwork for the extension, and will know within three to four weeks whether it has been approved.

Under the proposed timeline revision, demolition would start in June 2012 and a new hospital would open in mid-2014.

“The design and architecture work is all done,” said Jim Godbold, a spokesman for the Oregon region of PeaceHealth. “This delay is all about firming up unanswered questions about budgets at the state Legislature.”

PeaceHealth is waiting to hear how much state Medicaid revenues, a funding source for the project, may be cut. According to the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, a Senate bill expected to be passed by the Legislature would cut nearly $239 million from the second year of an $11.9 billion biennium budget for the Oregon Health Authority, which oversees health care for low-income and disabled Oregonians.

While the package is likely to pass, cuts to Medicaid have not been determined. Cuts are expected to be between $8 million and $32 million, Godbold said.

“It could be pretty dire for us,” he said. “Because of that we wanted the sixth-month extension to make sure and see if maybe we have to look at other funding types or maybe spread the payments out over a different time period.”

Approximately $30 million of the $73 million project cost is being covered by donations; the remainder is planned to come from bonds and other state sources.

The project consists of demolishing five existing buildings – a total of 335,000 square feet – and constructing a 120,000-square-foot, three-story hospital with 104 new hospital beds. Additionally, a total of 60,000 square feet of existing space in multiple buildings will be remodeled extensively.

Portland-based Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects completed the architecture work for the project. Turner Construction, the general contractor, previously served as the general contractor for a $500 million PeaceHealth facility in Springfield. A new price agreement and contract will have to be worked out with Turner; however, Godbold doesn’t expect any major changes.

“We’re trying to work with them and maintain the existing structure of the deal,” he said.

“We’re in good shape and in full support of PeaceHealth,” Turner Construction project manager Dan Kavanaugh said. “Our only concern is that it’s going to take some more time to get in there and start moving dirt. We’re in constant communication with the team there and we will spend the extra time further formalizing our involvement in the project.”

Additional changes are not out of the question. During the last delay, which lasted more than a year and a half, the project team decided not to follow the original idea of seismically upgrading and renovating the existing facilities.

“While I definitely don’t anticipate any changes, the last delay was beneficial to us,” Godbold said. “We rebid the project and found out that with drops in construction and materials costs it was cheaper to build new than remodel.”

Godbold said that past delays were because of the recession and uncertainty about health care reform, and that this one is merely a precaution.

“We’ve spent $2 million on this project in the last year alone, and fully expect to move forward,” he said. “We just don’t want to start demolishing buildings before we know for certain our funding is in place.”

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Hospitals can be intimidating – that was the starting point for design of the new home for The Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel.

The nine-story building won’t really resemble a hospital on the inside: ceilings, walls and floors will be paneled with wood; every patient room will be private and have a pull-out couch for visitors; and family lounges, gardens and even an art studio are designed to avoid a clinical feel.

“Kids can be in the hospital for days, for weeks and even months,” said Sue Ann Barton, principal at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects.

The $250 million, 334,000-square-foot, nine-floor building will rise above its neighbors in Northeast Portland. Architectural renderings show the building as a visible monument from across the Willamette River.

Presently, The Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel is housed within the greater hospital building, but the new facility will include the first pediatric-only emergency department in Oregon where children will have a building and entrance separate from adults, said Ali Sadri, senior manager of property management for Legacy Health System.

“The thing with kids (is that) when they get sick, the whole family comes,” said Sharron van der Meulen, a ZGF principal. The design team tried, as much as possible, to make rooms feel homey by concealing technological equipment.

“There’s more and more medical equipment in the patient rooms,” said Mark Peckover, an engineer with Sparling. “The challenge is to integrate that so it doesn’t feel like a sterile environment for the patient and family, but is still functional for staff.”

The design team constructed prototypes of every typical room type in a nearby Legacy building and then asked doctors and nurses to test them out. The team started with models in foam core and then built complete rooms with every element: from furniture to light switches and paper-towel holders.

“Things you don’t think they’re going to care about, they care about,” said van der Meulen.

“Because there’s all these built-in elements, you really want to make sure that they work for staff,” said Halliday Meisburger, associate partner with ZGF. “All the drawings in the world can’t take the place of actually touching and feeling something.”

“We were making changes all along the way,” Barton said. “Even during construction, we made a few changes that were vital to the operations.”

ZGF would like to use the process for all of its projects, but it isn’t always possible.

“It’s expensive, honestly,” Barton said. “It takes a lot of resources.”

Sustainable design can be difficult in medical facilities because of legal requirements for lighting and air circulation, but some energy-efficiency features were included. Peckover said the lighting is projected to use 25 percent less energy than Oregon code requires, and CDI Engineers selected high-efficiency chillers and boilers for the building’s HVAC system.

The building was specifically designed to not have a highly efficient envelope, Meisburger noted. In medical buildings, fresh air needs to be flushed through the building several times an hour, so a low-circulation air system wasn’t an option.

However, heat and cool air will be recovered as air is flushed through the building, said Richard Gerber with CDI Engineers.

Legacy is working to raise the remaining $25 million needed to complete the project. Work started in 2007 and is on track to wrap up in February 2012, Sadri said.

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The Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel won’t resemble a hospital on the inside: ceilings, walls and floors will be paneled with wood; every patient room will be private and have a pull-out couch for visitors; and family lounges, gardens and even an art studio are designed to avoid a clinical feel.

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