Full-blown hospital planned in Eagle

Original plan was to build an office complex

Click to Enlarge Browse Vail Daily Photos The appearance may change, but a hospital to be built at Eagle Ranch could look something like this conceptual drawing. A partnership between Vail Valley Medical Center and Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs will build and run the hospital. Courtesy Vail Valley Medical Center Get News Feeds

Scott N. Miller
March 2, 2006

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VAIL — The future came quickly.

A partnership of two regional hospitals has had plans for several years to build a medical office at Eagle Ranch in Eagle. A small hospital was seen as something that might get built later.

“Later” is now.

The governing boards of Vail Valley Medical Center and Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs this week agreed to start work on a hospital on the land the partnership owns in Eagle. Groundbreaking on the hospital could happen as soon as the spring of 2007. Work on the planned medical office building will start this year.

According to the current, very early, plans, the new hospital will have about 20 beds, with five of those beds dedicated to childbirth. The hospital will also have a basic emergency room that will be open 24 hours a day.

Word that a hospital, not a clinic, would be built at Eagle Ranch came as good news to a couple of longtime locals.

A new hospital

Where: Eagle Ranch, Eagle How big: 20 beds Estimated cost: $25 — $30 million Owners: Joint venture between Vail Valley Medical Center, Valley View Hospital Groundbreaking (estimated): Spring, 2007 This year: Work starts on a medical office building

“It’s a big deal to have these two entities come together. It’s exciting for all of us,” said Roxie Deane, manager of the Eagle Valley Medical Center.

The clinic Deane runs is associated with Valley View. Colorado Mountain Medical, associated with Vail Valley, also has an office in Eagle. Deane, a life-long resident of Eagle, remembers the days when the town advertised for a doctor with a sign on U.S. Highway 6 through town.

“It’s exciting for us, and exciting for the community to have this,” she said.

Tom Steinberg started his career in Vail seeing patients in the back of the Red Lion. As Vail’s first full-time doctor, he’s seen Vail Valley Medical Center grow from its earliest days. Steinberg said he never thought he’d see a day when a hospital would be built in Eagle.

“It was difficult enough to think about a hospital in Vail,” he said. “Things have changed.”

It was that change, and the pace of the change, that drove the decision to build a hospital in Eagle.

“Things have changed a lot in the last seven or eight years,” said. Valley View chief executive Gary Brewer. “That caused us to ramp up faster than we thought we would.”

The bottom line is population. Both Eagle and Gypsum are growing far faster than the valley east of Wolcott.

“It’s the right time to do this, and we’ve got the people to make it work,” said Greg Repetti, chief executive of Vail Valley Medical Center.

Besides moving medical services closer to a lot of customers, a hospital in Eagle will help Vail Valley Medical ease a serious space crunch. Parking is already tough at the hospital in Vail, and Colorado Mountain Medical will soon move most of its doctors and patients to the medical center in Edwards.

Besides clinic space, the Vail hospital recently bought a building near the Ford dealership in Gypsum, which will be used for storage and administrative offices.
While Vail Valley Medical will be the sole user of the building it just bought, both hospitals will split the cost of the new center in Eagle. And both hospital bosses are hoping for community support.

“We want to make sure this isn’t a tax burden to the people there, but we want to ask the communities for help,” Brewer said.

To that end, both Brewer and Repetti said some sort of fund-raising drive will be launched in Eagle and Gypsum.

“We want the community to feel they have ownership of it,” Repetti said.


Staff Writer Scott N. Miller can be reached at 949-0555, ext. 14624, or smiller@vaildaily.com.


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