ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 16, 1995 TAG: 9512180042
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
Radford Community Hospital's plan to relocate beside Interstate 81 cleared a hurdle this week when Montgomery County OK'd the removal of 40 acres at the proposed site from a county conservation district.
The county Board of Supervisors voted 5-1 to grant a request from Childress Farms Inc. to remove 40 acres from Agricultural and Forestal District 5. The Riner-area district, with 14,700 acres, is the largest of 12 AFDs totaling 40,000 acres in Montgomery County.
Supervisor Jim Moore was the lone "no" vote. He typically opposes the removal of land from such districts before the eight-year term expires.
The Childress Farms land, in 30- and 10-acre parcels, is part of 112 acres off Barn and Tyler roads in Montgomery County where Radford Community, part of the nonprofit Carilion Health System, plans to build a new $61.7 million, 97-bed hospital by 1998. The balance of the land was not in a conservation district.
Radford Community needed the removal OK'd before it could obtain a rezoning of the 112 acres. The hospital filed a rezoning request late last month and the county Planning Commission will take a first look at it at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Montgomery County Courthouse. Before the rezoning can be granted, the Montgomery supervisors will need to hold a public hearing, probably in late January.
Aside from the county land-use issues, Radford Community must obtain a certificate of need from the state before it can begin to build the hospital. So far, it has received thumbs-ups in the first two tiers of state review and is still in the regulatory pipeline. The state Health Department staff should be making a recommendation this month, to be followed by another level of review before the state health commissioner issues a final ruling. But even that decision can be appealed in the court system.
Radford is in competition with a joint proposal from Pulaski Community and Montgomery Regional hospitals, its rivals for control of the New River Valley's health-care market. The Pulaski and Montgomery hospitals are owned by Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country. Their proposal, for a new $26 million, 50-bed hospital in Radford, has been recommended for denial in the first two stages of state review.
Gene Wright, Montgomery Regional's chief executive officer, opposed the conservation-district removal in a public hearing before this week's Montgomery County vote. He raised the issue of what will happen to the land's tax status once it's owned by a not-for-profit entity.
Later, he noted that he'd recently paid Montgomery Regional's $135,000 semiannual county tax bill. "The county government treats it like it's nonexistent," Wright said.
Wright said the Radford Community plans amounted to the "second-most expensive per bed hospital ever built in the state of Virginia."
Susan Lockwood, a spokeswoman for Radford Community, questioned the source of Wright's assertion. "We feel we're doing what's in the best interest of meeting the health-care needs of the people of Southwest Virginia," she said. "We're certainly making a commitment to hold costs down as much as we can" while still providing the same quality of care.
Richard Roark, executive director of the Southwest Virginia Health Systems Agency, said his study of the competing proposals shows Radford had a lower capital cost per square foot than Montgomery-Pulaski's proposal, but a slightly higher direct construction cost per square foot. He did not compute a per-bed cost figure. Roark recommended approval of the Radford proposal on the condition that it drop a child-care center from the plans. His recommendation was adopted by the Health Systems Agency Board in October, which forwarded it to the state Health Department.
Before this week's vote, Mike Gates, a consultant for Radford Community, said plans for the exterior of the proposed hospital had changed slightly. In an attempt to "deinstitutionalize" the appearance of the building, architects have proposed a stucco-and-stone facade instead of brick, he said.
The land removed from the agricultural and forestal district this week is one of three tracts on which Radford Community has held options to buy since 1994.
The properties and their prices, according to documents filed with the hospital's request for a certificate of public need, include: the 40-acre Childress Farms property for $380,000; 32.5 acres for $308,750 from Wallace and Emogene Huff (listed as 35 acres on the rezoning request); and 37 acres for $351,000 from Emilie G. Gibson and Emogene Huff.
All three properties are given real-estate tax breaks as part of the county's land-use assessment program, which is designed to help preserve rural land. Once their use is changed the landowners will be required to pay "rollback" taxes. The rollback is the tax difference over the previous five years between the land's fair-market value and the land-use assessment. No estimate of the Childress rollback was prepared for the Board of Supervisors.
An officer of Childress Farms Inc., Floyd Childress III, is chairman of the county Agricultural and Forestal District Advisory Committee. On Dec. 5, the committee recommended approval of the withdrawal by a 4-0 vote, but Childress did not attend the meeting. The county Planning Commission also endorsed the move 8-0 on Nov. 20.
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