With a deadline looming, Jefferson Healthcare’s Board of Commissioners are weighing options and outlooks for their $125 million hospital expansion plan as hospital officials eye a November bond measure to help raise funds for the project.

The board is set to meet again Wednesday to discuss the expansion at the hospital — located in Port Townsend — and potentially take action on the project.

Mike Glenn, CEO of Jefferson Healthcare, talked about the hospital’s design approach for the expansion, the costs associated with the projects and funding sources, as well as plans for a bond measure vote in November to secure further funds for the campus expansion during a special board meeting last week.

The hospital is quickly approaching a July 27 deadline, when Jefferson County will decide what to include on General Election ballots.

“There’s a lot of just-in-time work going on with this … We’re right up against the deadline,” Glenn said during the meeting.

Jefferson Healthcare’s Campus Modernization and Expansion Project would bring new spaces and add specialty medical services to the healthcare prover’s campus on Sheridan Street, with two hospital buildings there set to be demolished and replaced with new, seismically-retrofitted structures to be constructed.

Citing an increase in patients and Jefferson Healthcare outgrowing the size of its current campus, the company plans to add a dermatology clinic, medical oncology space, OB-GYN clinic, and other services to the hospital campus.

Jefferson Healthcares hope is to put a bond measure before voters in November to seek approval for funding.

Hospital officials, however, have yet to publish renderings, a budget, or additional packets for the finalized plan for the $125 million project.

Due to the hospital’s designated design model, officials said that’s made it difficult to submit finished plans for the campus due to a variety of moving parts. 

“I hesitated to show previous iteration documents and numbers because I just knew they were wrong,” Glenn said during last week’s meeting, explaining why Jefferson Healthcare has been reluctant to share details.

“This model, this progressive design-build model, has overdelivered in this sense that we’re all working together,” Glenn said. “The person who’s drawing the drawings and the person who’s going to be building the drawings sitting at the same table is powerful.”

The hospital CEO said officials will release complete information for the expansion project on or before Aug. 2.

“It’s not necessarily the most elegant process, because it’s kind of like building a plane while you’re flying it. There’s a lot of stuff going on,” Glenn said. “We’re trying to identify what we’re going to build, services that will be in it, what it’s going to look like.”

As for the expansion’s hefty price tag, hospital officials said that close to half of the needed funds will come from Jefferson Healthcare.

“The only thing more expensive than building the walls of a hospital are paying for the equipment and technology that goes into it … the biggest driver of cost is square footage,” Glenn said.

He noted inflation, new costs, necessary square footage, and other factors that go into the project’s cost.

“We are stuffing a lot of important services into this and it has to be of a certain size,” he said.

Jefferson County Public Hospital District No. 2 Board of Commissioners is set to meet again Wednesday, July 20 for further discussion on the expansion, and plans to gather July 27 to figure out details regarding the plan.

Long term, hospital officials plan to spend the months leading to November’s General Election engaging with the community in hopes that residents will vote to support the ballot measure.