Lebanon
“I was up on a hill nearby while they did it,” recalled Stearns, now 70, whose two grown daughters both were born in the Hanover facility. “When the dust settled, I could see the old, original hospital (now administrative offices for the college’s Geisel School of Medicine) in the background. They’ve come a long way from then to now.”
Now, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, citing increased demand for services, seeks to expand the Lebanon campus with a $130 million proposal to build a four-story tower with 60 new inpatient beds, a new parking garage and more rooms in the emergency department.
The medical center, which serves both as a teaching hospital and as New Hampshire’s lone Level-1 trauma center, currently has 396 inpatient beds.
“Watching the hospital expand over the years, the assumption is that the care is good and well thought-out, so the expansion will be well-planned,” Stearns said. “I’ve had good care over the years, and I’ve never really questioned their expansion too much. The expansion is in response to demand for services that I may utilize some time in the future. Now that I’m basically retired, I’m more cognizant of the tax implications, plus water and sewer.”
Since the move to the 220-acre campus in Lebanon in 1991, DHMC also has added several research buildings, a separate center for outpatient surgery on the grounds, and an outpatient specialty clinic on Heater Road. Last week’s announcement of added beds left city officials looking forward to learning more details, so they can gauge how much the proposed expansion might strain city services — wastewater in particular — and add to the already-heavy traffic along Route 120 corridor between Lebanon and Hanover.
“(DHMC)’s presence here has a tremendous impact on our infrastructure, our police and fire departments,” City Councilor Karen Liot Hill said on Sunday. “We also have a lot of social service agencies and a public transit system that have grown up around having the hospital here, which is a good thing for people who need those services.”
In lieu of property taxes, DHMC makes a payment to the city of about $1 million. That amount is renegotiated every 10 years, with the next set of negotiations scheduled to start around the middle of 2021.
“The current payments are certainly helpful, but there are questions of whether it covers the impact that we have, ” Liot Hill said.
Once the city Planning Department sees a formal proposal and assesses the issues surrounding it, water and sewer also will be among the big issues for longtime Planning Board member Joan Monroe.
At first blush, she said, a tower with two floors of patient room and another ready to accommodate more seems likely to require more services than DHMC’s recently completed Williamson Translational Research Building.
“That was going to be more of a laboratory building, with mostly equipment, not requiring as much sewer or water,” Monroe said. “It’s not patients in beds who are going to be in there 24 hours a day, who have family coming to visit them.”
Those visitors will be adding to the traffic on Route 120.
“I’m lucky in that my daily commute is mainly from Perley Street to downtown Lebanon,” City Councilor Clifton Below said. “But I myself have been shocked when I go between Hanover and Lebanon during the evening rush hour, and there’s this long line of traffic from Centerra to Exit 18. When I moved here 40 years ago, I think there was one traffic light between downtown Lebanon and downtown Hanover. Maybe two.”
While awaiting the specifics on the DHMC project, Liot Hill and Monroe acknowledge the longer-term pressures on the medical center to meet the needs of its patients, especially the older ones.
“It’s inevitable that as the population grows, as it ages, there’s always more knowledge in illness and wellness, and what can be done about it,” Monroe said. “In this area we’re seeing a lot of businesses close because of all that people can do online now. One thing that can’t be done online is major medical procedures. The health of our bodies is going to stay, for the most part, a brick-and-mortar industry.”
Liot Hill, a Dartmouth College alumna and newly elected Grafton County treasurer, said she’s appreciated having the medical center since the younger of her two daughters required a complicated surgery three weeks after her birth.
“We are truly in this all together — Lebanon, DHMC, the whole Upper Valley,” Liot Hill said. “We’re in a very fortunate position in that we have a very resilient and strong economy, but’s it’s a position with a lot of the problems. We need to make decisions that will foster prosperity for all of us in the long term, but we also need to make sure that the property taxpayers of Lebanon are not carrying too much of the load. It has to be fair. It’s an acute situation for all of us.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.