After local opposition, Conway Medical Center will redesign its plans for a new hospital
Conway Medical Center officials are redesigning their plans for a new Carolina Forest hospital after state officials and local advocates raised environmental concerns about their project.
In original mock-ups, CMC proposed building the hospital on 30 acres in the northeast corner of a large, 359-acre lot, mostly made up of wetlands, along International Drive, near Ocean Bay Middle School and The Farm neighborhood. But the hospital’s proximity to wetlands worried local flood advocates.
With the Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve up the road, the designs drew a letter of concern from the state Department of Natural Resources, saying that the agency conducts controlled burns on the property to prevent wildfires that could interfere with hospital operations.
Now, CMC is proposing to locate the hospital in the southeast corner of the lot — further from the Heritage Preserve — and building around the wetlands rather than on top of them. To make the new designs feasible, CMC will also ask the state DNR to move the gates it uses to close International Drive during the controlled burns of the Heritage Preserve further west, past the entrance to the hospital.
The revisions come ahead of the Horry County Planning Commission’s meeting Thursday, where county planners and the public will both have a chance to weigh in on the hospital’s designs.
April O’Leary, the head of the local environmental advocacy group Horry County Rising, said she expects several members of the public to speak against the hospital’s plans at the meeting. The Planning Commission meets at the Horry County Government and Justice Center in Conway at 5:30 p.m.
CMC is also considering donating or selling 200 or more acres of the property to the county to be used as an additional nature preserve to help make the project more palatable for the county planners and council members who must approve it.
Horry County currently owns a large piece of property that’s designated as a nature preserve that borders the acreage where CMC wants to build.
“We’re willing to do what it takes to make sure this property fits what not only the hospital needs, but what your community needs,” said Brian Argo, CMC Chief Financial Officer, in a recent interview. “Some people you will never make happy, but when you look at alternatives to this property, I think a hospital makes an awful lot of sense.”
Key to Argo’s pitch to county planners is that the potential hospital site is currently zoned for residential housing. As the property exists today, Argo said, a developer could fit 700 households on the non-wetlands portions, a development that he argued would cause a much greater environmental impact that a new hospital.
By allowing the rezoning of the property from residential to medical, Argo added it would be easier for the county and DNR to only have to work with CMC to mitigate environmental concerns, rather than individual homeowners in the future.
“When you look at a hospital talking about developing here, versus all of this development here, that’s a heck of a lot less impact,” Argo said. “As compared to the alternatives, I think the hospital is a great option and a great partner to have.”
CMC’s proposed hospital
As currently designed, CMC is planning to build a 50-bed medical facility with an emergency room and intensive care unit meant to serve the booming Carolina Forest area.
First announced in early September, the $150 million hospital would also offer women’s health, surgical, cancer care, orthopedics and imaging services. The facility would include eight labor and delivery rooms and two C-section rooms for expecting mothers, six intensive care beds, three operating rooms and a six-bay infusion center.
The 50 beds would be transferred from CMC’s primary 210-bed facility in Conway, a move Argo said is meant to ensure that those 50 beds in CMC’s system are being fully utilized. He said the hospital doesn’t yet have plans for how it will use the space at Conway Medical Center once those beds are relocated.
According to the redesigned plans, CMC would build two roads off of International Drive into the facility, winding around, or bridging over, existing wetlands. The hospital, plus back and front parking lots, would be situated on the higher ground and bend around the surrounding wetlands.
The hospital has plans to build on 30 acres of the property and later expand to 50 acres.
“The campus location is situated on the property to use natural wetlands as a distance barrier to minimize smoke infiltration and wildfire vulnerability,” said CMC spokesperson Allyson Floyd in a statement Wednesday. “The campus design will have no wetlands encroachment impact because it follows the natural wetlands boundaries.”
Floyd also noted that the parking lots would use permeable materials, allowing cars to drive on top and water to soak through, as a means to reduce the amount of run-off into the surrounding wetlands.
Floyd said the hospital will use a specialized HVAC system to keep out any smoke from a controlled burn, in the case of one occurring while patients are in the hospital.
“The air intakes will utilize the latest filter technologies developed and proven in California to minimize wildfire smoke infiltration as well as be located far from the burn area and low velocity, further minimizing smoke infiltration,” she said.
CMC will also design the hospital with pandemics in mind, Floyd said, allowing for easy isolation of infected patients and using “anti-microbial touch surfaces and microbe-neutralizing air distribution systems.”
Environmental concerns
Despite the changes to the plans, environmental advocates still have doubts.
O’Leary, of Horry County Rising, said CMC’s new plans still fall short of addressing the concerns that the project would harm the surrounding wetlands.
“They’re following the wetland boundaries, so technically they are not ‘encroaching,’ but to state there’ll be no impacts to wetlands is grossly inadequate,” O’Leary said Wednesday. “I would push back on that.”
David Lucas, a spokesperson for the DNR, said the agency would review CMS’s additional plans submitted to the county, but said a letter sent to county planners is “pretty straightforward” about the project’s risks.
That letter, sent Oct. 26, said DNR’s controlled burns of the nearby Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve would interfere in the operations of the hospital. DNR conducts controlled, or prescribed, burns of certain wildlife preserves to help prevent uncontrollable wildfires.
“Knowing that prescribed fires will be conducted on adjacent property and that smoke will be present in this location, the SCDNR finds siting a medical facility in this location has unavoidable risks for the operation of a medical facility, including the use of emergency medical ambulances and helicopters,” DNR Director Robert Boyles wrote to county planners. “Ordinary and emergency visits to such a medical facility are also subject to the temporary closure of International Drive during prescribed fires.”
Lucas said in an email Wednesday that the burns would necessitate closing the gates to International Drive, which are currently west of The Farm and Ocean Bay Middle School.
In order to win county approval for the project, CMC would also have to successfully bid for a revision to the county’s Imagine 2040 future land use plan. O’Leary said changing that plan for CMC’s proposed hospital isn’t worth it.
The proposed hospital, she said. “is not compatible with our comprehensive plan, and there’s no real justification to make an amendment to the plan based on surrounding land use.”