Politics

City planners reviewing plans for health-ed project

By Bill Moss, Published: January 3, 2015

Architects designing the $35 million Joint Medical Education Facility have submitted applications to the city of Hendersonville for zoning approval of a 98,000-square-foot building that will dwarf the 35,000-square-foot medical office building next door.

The three-story building to house classrooms, labs and medical offices is a joint project of Wingate University, Blue Ridge Community College and Pardee guided by Henderson County on land bought by the city of Hendersonville.
The first stop for approval is the city's planning department, which a week before Christmas received two applications for special use permits, a request for a setback variance for an equipment yard and a fourth request for a parking lot on a vacant one-acre lot on the west side of North Oak Street.
"My understanding just from conversation is that will be student parking," said City Planning Director Sue Anderson. "They'll be adding that to the whole project and they can do that as long as it's 200 feet from the site."
The building footprint of eight-tenths of an acre extends beyond the one-acre parcel of land at 747 Sixth Avenue West the city bought and cleared. That means that the new building encroaches on Pardee-owned land now used for Medical Office Building (MOB) parking. Once the city approves the zoning, it plans to deed the property to Henderson County.
Henderson County has committed to borrowing about $28 million while Pardee has set aside $7 million for the cancer center construction, equipment and furnishings.

Architect and project manager Chad Roberson of the Clark Nexsen firm of Asheville, asked the city to amend a special-use permit that governed the construction of the Medical Office Building in 2000. The Planning Board and City Council will take up the amendment and a new special-use permit for the Joint Medical Education Facility with final approval expected by March 5. The parking lot across Oak Street from the current MOB parking lot requires staff review but not City Council approval, Anderson said.
"It gets really complicated because really what I'm juggling is three different applications associated with this one project," she said. "We're running them concurrently. The new parking lot is just a site review. They'll need to do landscaping and get a driveway permit" from the city's public works department.
The new building will eliminate some of the 183 parking spaces at the Medical Office Building. The Oak Street lot will add 68 spaces. A count of all available parking on the Pardee campus showed that the hospital has 356 more spaces than city code requires for the various uses.
"He's trying to calculate as far as parking campuswide," Anderson said. "There are a lot of little parcels involved with Pardee Hospital."
Although she emphasized that she had not yet reviewed the application, she said it's possible that the hospital can use the parking spaces associated with other nearby buildings to meet the city code requirement for the Joint Medical Education Facility. The calculation by Craig Franks, Pardee's director of planning, design and construction, showed that the new building would need 285 parking spaces — 165 for BRCC and Wingate and 120 for the cancer center.