Missouri Baptist Med Center seeks to modify office building plan

Missouri Baptist Medical Center wants to significantly modify its plan for a new medical office building.

The hospital's new proposal calls for reducing the size of the planned building, and creating an additional medical office building on top of an existing parking garage on the campus at 3015 N. Ballas Road.

Town & Country's Planning and Zoning Commission met on June 27 and unanimously approved recommending the change to the board of aldermen. The issue will next go before the city's architectural review board. The board of aldermen likely won't vote on the matter before August.

The city approved an earlier plan for the north medical office building in 2009. The new plan calls for reducing the building size from 185,000 square feet to about 93,000 square feet. However, the plans would still allow for the building to be built as high as six stories.

The 92,000 square feet of space taken away from that building would remain in the plan. It would take the form of a two-story medical office building on top of a two-story parking garage in the northwestern part of the medical center's almost 65-acre site.

George Stock, with Stock & Associates Consulting Engineers, told the commission the garage was designed to be able to hold additional floors. The change will improve the aesthetics of the area, he said.

The plan for the medical office building is part of an overall development plan approved for the Missouri Baptist campus. The first phase of the plan also included a new west pavilion addition, new parking lots, a vehicle storage building, an Ameren UE substation, the new Clinical Nursing Institute building with parking garage, and a new ring road through the campus. Stock said the medical office building would be part of the second phase of improvements.

Commissioner Rick Kelly told Stock he'd visited the campus before. "The existing parking garage (which the new office building would be atop) is usually packed, so it's tough to find a spot now," Kelly said. "Your plan will increase the number of people who'll be in that building, and I'm afraid patients will be scrambling."

Doug Black, vice president of program and campus development for the hospital, said a new garage on the campus has been underused.

"When our new ring road opens, that garage will be more used, because it wasn't convenient during construction in that area," he said. "We'll move employees there to free up some garage space."

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Missouri Baptist Med Center seeks to modify office building plan