Hospital's Plan Changes; Resistance Does Not

New Suburban Proposal Would Raze More Homes

Suburban Hospital has unveiled a $230 million plan to expand its 65-year-old Bethesda facility, but as it prepares to submit the project for county review in coming weeks, the hospital remains at odds with neighbors.

The new Suburban plan, which replaces a preliminary design from last spring, would improve access to the emergency room, add private patient rooms, create physicians' offices, expand parking and modernize and enlarge the hospital's 15 operating rooms.

It includes changes the hospital says are a response to community concerns about the preliminary plan: reducing the height of its main hospital addition, for example, and scaling back physicians' offices. There are more walkways, gardens and green spaces.

"We have tried, as much as possible, to be responsive to their concerns, but we are not going to be able to be responsive 100 percent," said Ronna Borenstein-Levy, a hospital spokeswoman.

Neighborhood activists take a harsher view, saying that the hospital has done little to accommodate their main objections, which include the demolition of single-family homes -- 23, up from 19 -- and the closing of one block of Lincoln Street, a main route into the community from Old Georgetown Road.

Bob Deans, spokesman for the Huntington Terrace Citizens' Association, compared the two expansion designs to the difference between getting hit by a cinderblock and a brick. "They started out with a horrendous plan, and now all they have is a pernicious plan," he said. "Is that better? Well, no, not really."

The new plan reduces the prominence of physicians' offices, a major issue for the association. Before, such offices were allotted twice as much space, in a free-standing building. Now, they would occupy half of one floor of the main addition. The hospital says the offices will make doctors more accessible to patients.

But the citizens association sees the offices as an unnecessary commercial venture in an area that is zoned residential, with the hospital operating on a special exception. "There's just no justification to destroy a residential community to build commercial offices when they don't belong there and aren't needed," Deans said.

The hospital says the project, its first major renovation in nearly 30 years, will be submitted in coming weeks to the county's Board of Appeals, starting a review process that could take 18 to 24 months and will include County Council action on the proposal to close Lincoln Street. A groundbreaking would be slated for 2011, with completion in 2013.

Suburban Hospital, which is the county's only trauma center, is on Old Georgetown Road, across from the National Institutes of Health, its clinical partner. The NIH Heart Center is located at Suburban, as is the NIH Stroke Center.

The Huntington Terrace neighborhood, with 300 homes, surrounds the hospital to the west, north and south.

Suburban staff members walked the neighborhood Feb. 6 to drop off the revised plan at each home. Borenstein-Levy, the hospital spokeswoman, described opposition as coming primarily from the officers of the neighborhood group, not the community at large.