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Medical building OK’d

LAKE PLACID – Work could begin as soon as next month on Adirondack Health’s proposed medical fitness center on Old Military Road.

The project received final approval Wednesday from the Lake Placid-North Elba Joint Review Board, six months after it was first presented.

“It feels very good to reach this point,” said project manger Jim Marlow. “It’s been a long process.”

The 42,000-square-foot facility would be located across from the U.S. Olympic Training Center and next to the Uihlein Living Center nursing home, which Adirondack Health is selling to Post Acute Partners, a New York City based health-care services company.

The medical fitness center would house all the services currently provided at Adirondack Health’s Church Street hospital: a part-time emergency room, doctors’ offices, laboratory and radiology. It would also feature a gymnasium, a 75-foot lap pool, a hydrotherapy pool and larger physical rehabilitation space.

The current hospital building would go to the town of North Elba.

The building’s style and design is meant to connect with the natural environment of the Adirondacks through the use of large open spaces with views to the outdoors. Columns outside the main entrance, across its large glass facade, are meant to simulate trees in a forest.

Project architect Keith Davis said there were some tweaks but no major changes to the plan he originally presented to the board in March.

“I think the concept stayed consistent,” Davis said. “The influence of the board honed in on some of the elements important to them that we were able to incorporate. If anything, it augmented the design.”

In May, residents of the neighboring Mountain Meadows development showed up in force at a review board meeting. They said the facility would be built too close to their properties and called for the building to be moved further east, closer to the nursing home.

Davis said they considered moving the building further east, but that would have put the parking lot closer to Mountain Meadows.

“We felt it was better to cradle the building in the woods and keep the parking lot, and the resulting lights, away from the residential area,” Davis said in May.

Since then, Davis and Marlow said they changed the project’s grading plan so they didn’t have to take out as many trees. They also lowered the height of the parking lot lighting fixtures so they’re more in line with dark-sky standards.

Now that the project has review board approval, the next step is to secure building permits from the town.

“We’re waiting for some approvals from (the state Department of Health),” Marlow said. “Our expectation is we’d break ground in October, but that’s yet to be determined.”

At a prior meeting, the review board approved a subdivision of the property that put the nursing home on a different lot than the proposed medical fitness center.

The Lake Placid facility is one of two big projects Adirondack Health is planning that will cost a combined $33 million. The other is a 37,000-square-foot surgical services wing on the back of Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake.

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