Boulder Community Health to present Riverbend concept to planning board

BOULDER —  The city of Boulder’s planning board on Thursday, March 3, will consider Boulder Community Health’s conceptual plans to build a 76,000-square-foot medical building next to its Foothills Hospital campus in the Riverbend Office Park off Arapahoe Road.

The hospital, which announced its plans in July, wants to redevelop properties located at 4801, 4855, 4865 and 4885 Riverbend Road. Over the past several years, the hospital has been buying property in Riverbend.

The proposal includes the construction of a 55-foot tall building and a five-story, 467-stall parking structure with accessory office and retail space. The proposal includes consolidating the existing properties into one 2.55-acre project site, which is east of 48th Street, opposite the entrance to the Foothills hospital and south of Ball Aerospace & Technologies’ Fisher Integration Facility.

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The BCH Riverbend Medical Center would house departments that are housed at the hospital’s former campus on Broadway in west Boulder. The hospital sold the campus to the city of Boulder in December for $40 million. Proceeds of the sale will be used for the new medical building. BCH hopes to move all its services from its Broadway location by December 2017

Hospital officials had a pre-application meeting in July with city planners, starting the process that in addition to gaining building approval, will require a rezoning of the area and a height-restriction modification. The new building would house the hospital’s behavioral health, in-patient rehabilitation and neurology departments, along with an electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT unit. ECT, often referred to as shock treatment, is a standard psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in patients to provide relief from psychiatric illnesses.

Foothills hospital was approved in 2001 to construct up to 420,000 square feet of floor area in six phases for a period up to 10 years. Currently, the BCH Foothills campus has been built up to 400,000 square feet.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said the BCH Foothills campus has been built up to 261,430 square feet.