DATE: Friday, October 17, 1997              TAG: 9710170651

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   91 lines

NORFOLK ENTERS NEW ERA IN PUBLIC HEALTH FIELD

Police departments across Hampton Roads should be able to nab criminals sooner.

State medical examiners will have real offices, instead of working out of file closets.

And the city is planting a seed officials hope will bloom into a nationally recognized biomedical research center.

On a rainy, chilly day, after nearly a decade of dreaming and scheming to make all that happen, city and state officials broke ground Thursday for a $30 million public health and research park building.

It is expected to transform the regional delivery of modern health services, from treating AIDS patients and offering flu vaccinations, to forensics support for law enforcement agencies from Suffolk to the Eastern Shore.

The five-story, 197,000-square-foot facility, scheduled to open in December 1999, will be built on a 2.3-acre site on the south side of Brambleton Avenue across from the Eastern Virginia Medical School and the existing public health building it will replace.

It will be nearly triple the size of the existing facility, a 1960s-era building described as an out-of-date, cramped and ill-equipped building that leaks. Additions from the 1970s have failed to keep pace with the advancing technology associated with modern medical and health needs and the space needed to accommodate growing demands, officials said.

``This is an important day for us,'' said Dr. Marcella Fierra, Virginia's chief medical examiner. ``When you plan a building like this, you plan it for a generation.''

For the city, the building will add a new twist to economic development efforts. The top floor will be used as ``incubator'' space to lure private firms involved in biomedical research, a rapidly advancing field ranging from reproductive medicine to genetics.

``We have had companies that have sought to come here and didn't because there was no place to accommodate them,'' said City Councilman Mason C. Andrews, a physician at the nearby Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine. ``This just seemed a sensible step to induce future development.''

Mayor Paul D. Fraim said he hopes the facility will attract research scientists from across the country and create a ``synergy'' with local universities and the surrounding medical complex, leading to the development of important new medical products and technology.

The new health center will rise on a former parking lot next to The Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters' Neuro-Development Center and the Eastern Virginia Medical School's Diabetes Institute.

An overhead pedestrian bridge will link the EVMS campus with the center.

About 150 people will work there full-time protecting the public health, including doctors, nurses, health inspectors, field biologists and researchers.

Currently, the main office of the city's public health department treats about 200 patients a day, said Dr. Valerie Stallings, the director. She said the new building will ``allow us to work more efficiently and for a better outcome, for certain.''

Dr. Leah Bush, deputy chief medical examiner, said the new facility will add space for more autopsy tables, storage of medical records and offices. The office handles more than 600 autopsies a year, including all murder cases and other sudden or unexplained deaths.

Over at forensics, laboratory director Robert J. Campbell said the new building will make room for 16 additional employees and modern equipment that will reduce the turnaround time on DNA analysis for police criminal cases from six to 10 weeks to one week. Many samples now have to be sent to Richmond because the Norfolk office lacks the equipment to test them, he said.

Additionally, forensics also should be able to test more quickly potentially illegal substances seized by police. In September alone, the forensics lab took in 922 drug cases, Campbell said.

The building also will be equipped with a firing range where officials can conduct ballistics tests. And they will add new equipment enabling the staff to pick up fingerprints and trace chemistry on evidence turned in by police.

``We are so crammed in now that we just can't add the people or the equipment,'' Campbell said.

All in all, criminal justice in the region should be better served, Bush said.

``It'll help us gain evidence to help police make arrests and the courts put the right person in jail,'' Bush said.

The new facility is being developed through an unusual partnership between Norfolk and the state. The city's Industrial Development Authority is issuing bonds to finance construction. But the state will pay off the debt through annual lease payments to the city over 20 years. When the lease expires, the state has the option to buy the building for $1.

The city floated about $2.2 million in bonds to finance construction of the biomedical research section, which officials say will be paid off by leases from private firms that locate there. ILLUSTRATION: Color drawing

The Facts

For complete copy, see microfilm KEYWORDS: NORFOLK DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH

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