The biggest employer in Park County is getting a new building. It's Livingston Health Care's new hospital. Hospital leaders say they need it to stay competitive with Bozeman and keep its $18 million payroll in town.
The big, steel skeleton is going up on Livingston's east side, just north of the Interstate. It's projected to be open in the fall.
Bren Lowe, Livingston Health Care's CEO, hass been giving a lot of tours of the construction site lately.
"You know it's coming along when the staircase is already in," he says, trudging up the snow-covered frame of what will be the main public stairway from the lobby to the in-patient wing, none of it yet enclosed when I visited in November.
The 125,000 square foot new hospital will be roughly three times as big as the present hospital, and will also house several outpatient clinics. Lowe says the new patient rooms are going to be a lot different.
"A huge advantage over our current facility, is one of these rooms is bigger than what we have two patients in now," Lowe says. "These large picture windows, you can see the view is just incredible. You can see right now the Crazy Mountains with the snow just popping on them."
It's taken Livingston Health Care more than a decade to get to this point – there are a lot of reasons for that – but it's been obvious for a long time that the community needed a new hospital. Lowe took me to the old hospital, which is still in use.
"The hospital itself was built in 1955," he says.
"This is definitely not your typical hospital entrance," Low says, entering a narrow wooden ramp with a very temporary-looking pitched roof over it.
"In the course of trying to find financing for the new facility, we had somebody that came out and wanted to look at the facility, and this is where we started. And they looked at the main entrance and said, 'this is all I need to see, you need a new facility,'" he recalls, laughing.
The limitations are acutely felt by the people who work here, like Dr. Scott Coleman.
"This is a tremendous nursing staff and medical staff," Coleman says, "and we get that kind of feedback from patients that are very, very committed. And, at the end of that sentence we also have a comment about the facility, and some issues with their stay along those lines, and so I think it has become somewhat of an expectation on our side to feel a little bit challenged by that, to expect that type of comment from patients, perhaps to offer a bit of an apology, and for so many years to not really know what to do with that. It's worked a little bit on our psyche over the years."
The old hospital also works on the psyches of doctors and nurses Livingston Health Care tries to recruit. Coleman was one of those doctors in 1999. His parents had settled in Livingston a decade earlier, and he said it felt a lot like home, but...
"I think the facilities and the medical setting at that time kept me away. And in 2005 I came back somewhat on the promise and hope that this was in the works."
Nobody anticipated it taking another decade to get to construction. The hospital was actually on the cusp of selling bonds to finance the new hospital in 2008, and then the real estate bubble burst and things had to be put on hold. Since then, Livingston Health Care has been able to get low interest loans from the US Department of Agriculture and a private bank to cover most of the forty-three-and-a-half million dollar price tag for the new hospital.
The new building will allow Livingston to bring under one roof all of its many departments and clinics. Now, a lot of them are in trailers on and off the hospital's campus, in former houses across the street and, in the case of the clinic where Dr. Coleman works, part of an apartment building several blocks away. That makes it hard for him to tend to hospitalized patients, even if it is a beautiful location.
Back out at the construction site, hospital CEO Bren Lowe is clearly very happy at the progress that the construction firm from Kalispell is making on the new hospital, and that some Livingston locals are getting work building it. He says he believes it's the biggest construction project currently underway in Montana. It should help Livingston Health Care remain viable for a long time in the face of competition from hospitals in Bozeman and Billings.
Livingston's hospital is a non-profit, run in partnership with Billings Clinic. Lowe says it brings in a little more money than its expenses. That's something not all rural hospitals can say, and that's a reason it's able to get loans for all but $10 million of its projected construction costs. That means they have to raise it, and raising $10 million in a county with only about 16,000 people in it is no small task.
"That goal is more than five times any amount that's ever been raised in Park County. And so, it is a reach. But it is, to me, possible," Lowe says.
The hospital started its capital campaign about a year ago, and has brought in $6 million so far, mostly from big donors and hospital employees. He's confident they'll be able to raise the rest when they start reaching out to the broader community this spring.
