Plan for 12-story hospital on the Mesa abandoned

Plan for 12-story hospital on the Mesa abandoned

       When Margaret Sabin, then the CEO and president of Penrose-St. Francis Health Services, sought to persuade Colorado Springs City Council in November 2015 to approve a hospital with a 200-foot height allowance on Centennial Boulevard at Fillmore Street, she framed the overall goal as a question:
       “How do we support and make sustainable the next 100 years of health care in our community so we create a foundation for our children and our children's children and generations to come?”
       The generational goal has changed.
       As evidence, the organization has decided not to build the Westside hospital after all.
       The Centennial site was to have been the entity's “third campus” in Colorado Springs. The new plan, based on where the city is growing the most, is to build that campus in an as-yet-undisclosed place in the “northern part of the city,” according to Penrose-St. Francis spokes-person Andrea Sinclair.
       The Westside property, which has no uses at present, consists of adjoining tracts of property (51 and 28 acres). The larger parcel is across Centennial from the Grandview Market Place shopping center that includes King Soopers. The 28-acre site was formerly used for an asphalt batch plant.
       The location is atop a plateau known as “the Mesa” or “Fillmore Hill,” which was only lightly developed until about 15 years ago.
       P-SF had pushed for the Centennial location from 2015 to 2017. The prime reasons given were its proximity to I-25 as well as to the entity's currently tight-for-space North Cascade Avenue hospital, for which the new facility was to provide some relief.
       Jamie Smith, the P-SF chief administrative officer, told Planning Commission in 2015 that the Westside proposal followed a “very exhaustive search” for hospital locations and the Centennial site “truly was number 1, 2 and 3 for us. So there are not a lot of other options, as we see it, so we want to do what we possibly can to make it work and make the city proud of what we do.”
       Sinclair summarized the altered thinking, as follows: “While the initial plan to replace Penrose Hospital with a new hospital on the hill was inspirational, it did not address the current market changes that we are experiencing as a health system or the projected growth and development for our region.”
       In pushing for the Westside site, P-SF bought the Centennial/Fillmore acreage, met with local residents and gained approvals from Planning Commission as well as City Council (twice).
       The first council approval in 2015 OK'd a hospital complex with support buildings of varying sizes and a 200-foot height allowance on part of the property. The hospital roof would have allowed landings and takeoffs by rescue helicopters.
       Council's second approval in 2017 reduced the height limit to 165 feet, after Penrose officials had met with neighborhood groups who were unhappy about the prospect of such tall buildings on top of the Mesa.
       The 51-acre parcel is being sold back to its previous owner, Grandview Office LLC. Don Hare, representing the LLC, said there are no immediate development plans, but the group plans to go back to the mixed-use zone (chiefly retail and office) that it had before - with the tallest height probably 45 feet.
       Purchased a year after the other parcel, the 28-acre property is still owned by P-SF. Asked whether it too will be sold, Sinclair said that effort “is in the works.”
       Another local worry with the P-SF development proposal was the stability of the property. A major landslide had occurred about 20 years ago just north of it, and the council approval insisted on such issues being addressed before construction could begin.

Westside Pioneer article