SEQUIM – After a wait that stretched some two years longer than planned, site preparation has begun for the nearly 35,000-square-foot Jamestown Medical Clinic alongside the Olympic Medical Cancer Center.
The Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s new medical center will be open to the general public, and its providers will accept Medicare and Medicaid as well as private insurances, Jamestown chairman W. Ron Allen said last week.
He estimated that the clinic will open in May to replace the much smaller Jamestown Family Health Clinic that opened in Sequim with two doctors in 2002.
Allen said eventually the tribe’s dental clinic, now located in Blyn, will move to the Fifth Avenue campus.
Back in the summer of 2007, Allen and officials from Olympic Medical Center announced ground would soon be broken for the new facility on 2.5 acres of land donated by OMC.
The project was to be funded largely by a low-interest loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural development program for under-served Americans.
But the tribe later learned that the funding was no longer available. Through much of 2008, Allen searched for alternative financing — as economic conditions worsened across the region and nation.
Finally, First Federal stepped up, Allen said, to lend the tribe a large portion of the $7 million it will take to construct and equip the clinic.
A relatively small grant of $500,000 from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department is also part of the financing package, and the tribe plans to seek additional federal funding.
According to the building permit issued by the city of Sequim, the two-story project includes 21,000 square feet of clinic space on the ground floor, 9,894 square feet for tribal offices upstairs and a 3,731-square-foot fitness center that Allen said will be for tribal members and clinic staff.
J.M. Grinnell Contracting, owned by Jamestown tribal member Jack Grinnell, is the project’s general contractor.
The medical clinic will be built first, Allen said, to address the demand for health care across the Dungeness Valley, a need that has been growing steadily even as OMC has expanded its campus on Fifth Avenue.
Bill Riley, Jamestown’s Health & Human Services director, tells that tale with numbers.
In 2005, the Jamestown Family Health Clinic counted 18,700 visits. In 2008, the clinic, now at 777 N. Fifth Ave., saw 34,000 visits.
Ever since plans to build the new center were announced, the small clinic has been adding staff, Riley said. Today, it has nine medical doctors and six nurse practitioners and will add two more providers “as soon as we can.”
As for patient capacity, “we are full,” Riley said. The clinic has always accepted Medicare and Medicaid.
He took care to add that, although the new Jamestown Medical Clinic will be more spacious, it will be large enough to accommodate the current level of patient visits — and not necessarily more.
The center will, however, feel different to its staff and those who seek care there.
Employees at the existing clinic worked with Sequim architect Roy Hellwig to shape an environment that’s easy on patients, Riley said.
Examination rooms will be clustered around the waiting room so people don’t have to walk down long hospital-like hallways, he added, and the waiting area will feel like a living room, with windows letting in abundant natural light.
“It’s going to be designed for the patient,” said Virginia Gruca, the front-office manager at the Family Health Clinic. “We are thrilled.”
The new center will have 130 parking stalls, Hellwig added, and out in front will be a 25-foot totem pole, already carved by Dale Faulstich and his assistants at the Jamestown Tribal Center.
It has taken perseverance, he acknowledged, to arrive at this point in construction of the medical center.
“I have a dual agenda: taking care of the health care needs of our community — we made the commitment to the public years ago — and making it work as a business,” he said. “We knew we were going to make it happen. It just took a lot longer than we wanted” to get the financing in order.
“We finally matched it up,” he said.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
