Listen to this articleMore than seven years after HealthPartners began to assemble land for a new Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, the $400 million project is now under environmental review and on track for a spring construction start.
This week, the city of Stillwater released an environmental review document, known as an Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW), for the 400,000-square-foot project, which will rise on part of a 64-acre site at Manning Avenue North and Highway 36. The EAW process, which includes a 30-day comment period, looks at potential project impacts on everything from noise and traffic to historic properties and greenhouse gas emissions. The comment period runs through April 17.
Next steps include planning commission review. The commission, at its March 26 meeting, will look at land use applications. The project could move to the full city council in April, Scott Beedy, HealthPartners senior communications consultant, said in an email Friday.
The EAW reveals that the plan is to begin construction this spring and complete the project in summer 2027.
Jason Zimmerman, Stillwater’s interim community development director, said the city council will review the EAW on May 6.
“Following that, assuming they don’t see the need to do a more in-depth Environmental Impact Statement, then they’ll look to take action on the land use pieces. In theory, by the end of the night on May 6, the hospital would have the approvals it needs to keep moving forward,” Zimmerman said Friday.
Included in the project are 85 inpatient beds, 20 observation beds and an 11-bed emergency room. The new six-story hospital will be nearly twice as big as the existing Lakeview Hospital — a 212,000-square-foot, 1960s-vintage building in the north-central part of Stillwater.
Surrounded by a residential area, the existing hospital is “aging and no longer meets the needs of today’s health services,” according to the EAW. At the new site, Health Partners has enough space for a future 56,000-square-foot expansion. Also included in the plan is up to 24,000 square feet of space for one or more medical office buildings.
The new hospital and medical office campus will provide “a more readily accessible facility … versus depending on the local/city roadway network, and provide for necessary parking needs,” according to a project narrative.
Ben Gutknecht, Stillwater planning manager, said a hospital has been at the current Lakeview site for 100 years, with the existing building dating to 1961. But the size is constrained and “doesn’t afford a lot of room for growth,” Gutknecht said in February.
HealthPartners acquired property for the new hospital in 2017. Finance & Commerce reported at the time that the Lakeview Memorial Hospital Association paid $4.575 million in cash for about one-third of the land it would need to build the new hospital campus.
In November 2023, HealthPartners announced that it was moving into the “next phase of planning” for the project, which will combine critical care and specialized centers for heart, cancer and orthopedic care in one campus.
“The east metro and western Wisconsin communities we serve continue to grow and change. For example, the number of people over 65 years old is projected to increase 20% over the next five years. The need for coordinated services for chronic illnesses such as cardiology, cancer and orthopedic care will also increase,” Lakeview Hospital President Brandi Lunneborg said at the time.
Health Partners’ project team includes HKS, an architectural firm out of Chicago, in partnership with local design firm BWBR. Also on board are engineering firms Dunham, ERA and Loucks. Concord Group, a national real estate advisory firm, is the owner’s representative.
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