Hospital's Plan Changes; Resistance Does Not
New Suburban Proposal Would Raze More Homes

By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2008

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.

"We continue to get phone calls from other people in the Huntington Terrace neighborhood who support what the hospital is doing and are very pleased that Suburban continues to make time and effort to communicate directly with each of the 300 homes," Borenstein-Levy said.

Deans said that the Huntington Terrace community is "absolutely united on this issue." He said residents support Suburban's effort to modernize and expand, but voted in June, 155-0, to oppose any plan that would close Lincoln Street, demolish homes, build commercial offices or expand surface parking.

Lincoln Street "is the spine of our community," Deans said. "Suburban cannot snap that spine without destroying our community."

The road closure would allow the hospital to join the addition to the existing building. The addition would be a four-story, 300,000 square-foot patient-care building with a surgical wing on the first floor, physicians offices and pre-admission testing on the second floor, and private patient rooms on the third and fourth floors, which the hospital says are important for infection control purposes.

The plan also calls for a larger parking garage, with room for almost 1,200 vehicles, to replace its 268-space facility. Now, 150 employees park off-site, and visitor and patient cars are routinely double- and triple-parked, the hospital said.

The hospital has acquired some of the land it needs for the project by buying up homes. Last spring, the hospital said 19 homes would be demolished, but that number has increased to 23 because of the new design.

"I wasn't happy with 19, and I'm less with 23 or 24," resident Amy Shiman said. Bulldozing homes for the expansion, she said, "just runs counter to what our residential neighborhood believes in, which is housing."

Suburban's plans do not specify any increase in its 228 patient beds. But the hospital says the expansion would improve the flow of services to patients, so that more people can be cared for and fewer turned away, as sometimes happens when hospitals are at capacity.

Norman Knopf, attorney for the neighborhood association, said the lack of additional beds raises questions about the larger need. "They are closing the main artery to the community, they are destroying 23 houses and they are not adding one more bed," he said.

Knopf said the community believes the expansion could be largely contained in a block-long parking area that fronts Old Georgetown Road.

In response, Suburban said it has used that area as much as is possible, given its goals to improve traffic patterns and create an efficient configuration for operating rooms.

The debate is expected to continue as Suburban's plan wends its way through the county approval process. Still, Deans said, the neighborhood hopes to work with Suburban to resolve their differences. "We're willing to work as hard as it takes," he said, "and as long as it takes to get there."