The wheels are finally in motion for the initial steps toward expanding Eureka Springs Hospital.
At its Nov. 21 regular meeting at The Auditorium, the Eureka Springs Hospital Commission approved a contract to spend $824,250 for the first two steps in the engineering phases of the project of remodeling and expanding the current facility.
“I’m really excited about the hospital expansion going forward,” commission chair Barbara Dicks said after the unanimous vote. “We’re moving and grooving.”
The vote came after architect Tom Johnson discussed the proposal with the commission, explaining the first two steps in the expansive process will be the schematic design phase and then the design development phase.
Those two steps are necessary to be completed in early 2023 when they will be presented as a way to hopefully get federal funding for the hospital expansion project.
“The contract we’ve written is based on a $30 million project,” Johnson said. “Our architectural engineering fee is at 7.85 percent of that figure. And that’s the figure that we will be building on at the start of the project. We’re going to request for you to authorize the first two phases. There’s five different phases of this contract and each phase has to be voted on by your commission.”
“So, we’re asking for the first two phases, which add up to 35 percent (of the architectural engineering fee), which was our target goal of trying to get 35 percent of the documents ready to take toWashington in February.”
Johnson said the first phase, schematic design, is 15 percent of the overall construction contract and the design development phase is 20 percent.
“We basically take the design we develop … in the first phase and carry that further to make sure that everything is workable,” he said. “We start putting equipment and dimensions and that type of thing just to make sure that the whole project is workable. … And from that point on, we would of course, hopefully the project would be funded, but we would stop until we got authorizations to proceed further after you get your funding to go on into the construction documents, the procurement phase for bidding and then observing the construction during the construction process.”
