PORT ANGELES — To free up parking space for patients and visitors, Olympic Medical Center has requested bids for an 89-spot employee parking area near the Port Angeles hospital.
The new parking area would be built in the quarter-block just east of the existing parking area at Chambers and Columbia streets, where two houses exist now, and the sliver of land between the general surgery and urology buildings.
“When this hospital gets full, it gets very challenging to find a parking spot,” Chief Executive Officer Eric Lewis said during last week’s commissioners’ meeting.
“We do get periodic complaints from patients and visitors that they can’t find a place to park.
“So one of our major goals is to address that patient-satisfaction issue.”
The cost of the parking lot expansion is not to exceed $370,000.
A side project is to add an emergency power source to the hospital, which is at 939 Caroline St., by placing a conduit under the new parking area.
“Right now, we’re fed from Race [Street] at the west side of the hospital,” Lewis said.
“There’s a separate electric grid to the east that if we brought in a separate electrical power service, we would have two different ways of getting power to the hospital. We currently have two different water connections. It would be a good situation to have two different electrical services.”
Cost of conduit
The cost of the conduit installation is not to exceed $75,000.
Commissioners voted 7-0 to authorize hospital administration to put the projects out to bid.
Bids are due July 16, and commissioners will consider the bids July 18.
“I think it’s a good bidding environment, and we’re anxious to get a number of contractors interested and see what the bids come in at,” Lewis said.
The parking lot project is part of an $8.3 million expansion of the hospital’s emergency room, which will grow from nine beds to 21 beds once completed in 2014.
The city of Port Angeles won’t allow the hospital to expand without more parking.
“It’s also part of our Port Angeles campus development plan,” Lewis said of the project.
“We’ve carefully looked at where parking’s going to go for the coming decades and where we want to eventually maybe have a medical office building or expand other services.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
