By Seth Boyes,
Crews were making preparations on the north side of the WinnMed campus in Decorah. (Photo by Seth Boyes)
Steel beams are in place, and more concrete floors will soon be poured as part of WinnMed’s Transforming Tomorrow project.
The campaign includes expansion of the local hospital’s clinic spaces as well as its surgical services. The $50 million project includes a two-story addition estimated to add 30,000 square-feet to WinnMed’s facility on Montgomery Street. Plans call for specialty services on its lower level and family practice rooms on the second. In addition, operating rooms will be reworked, and an endoscopy room will be added as part of the Transforming Tomorrow project, and the hospital’s labor and delivery suites will be remodeled to allow delivery and postpartum to take place in the same room.
Ben Stevens, chief financial officer at WinnMed, said Transforming Tomorrow grew out of a feasibility study conducted several years ago. Project managers arrived on site in January of this year, and contractors followed in March. Stevens said, while this summer’s plentiful rainfall held crews at bay for some time, they’ve been making up for lost time over the last several weeks.
Jordan Archer, project manager with Graham Construction, told hospital officials last week that crews are wrapping up their work with the surgical area’s steel structure and will then be moving on to the clinic area — Stevens said concrete for the clinic’s floor is expected to be poured in the coming weeks.
“One of the big milestones we did accomplish this quarter, apart from finishing foundations and getting steel erected, was that we did get our air handling unit,” Archer said. “In the construction world, with procurement lead times on various components — really since COVID — has been very challenging. Not getting some of that major equipment is something that can wreak havoc on construction schedules, so that was a huge success.”
Archer noted there were some issues procuring doors earlier in the process, and he said the decision to lower a floor’s elevation by about a foot resulted in some extra work, but he said he feels there won’t be many more unexpected financial obstacles as the project moves forward.
“We generally see a lot of unforeseen costs at the front end of projects, with design modifications and unforeseen conditions in soil,” Archer said during the Aug. 7 hospital board meeting. “We’ve been kind of working our way through that, but we should be done with that now. That was a big risk to the project that we’re through now and, from a budget standpoint, I think (we) fared very well through that.”
Archer indicated a 50 percent financial contingency had been factored for in the project budget, and he said approximately $900,000 of the construction contingency dollars were still available at this point.
Stevens explained the Transforming Tomorrow project is largely funded through rural development grants provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He said the hospital also paying about $7 million out of its own coffers and has the ability to borrow up to approximately $8 million from local banks, but he said the USDA funds are fixed 30-year loans, which he said are uncommon in the world of commercial business.
The overall project is expected to take place over about 2.5 years. Stevens said the remodeling of WinnMed’s obstetrics areas is slated for completion in January of 2025 — Archer said work in that department is progressing well and moving toward above-ceiling inspections.
Stevens said the remodeling of the surgical facilities will be the project’s final phase, tentatively scheduled for completion in January of 2026.
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