By Philip Lange @ Shutterstock.com
The City of Naples, Florida is being asked by Naples Community Hospital to allow taller building heights for hospital buildings downtown. Omar Rodriguez Ortiz reports for the Naples Daily News:
The Naples Community Hospital is asking the city of Naples to create a new downtown hospital zoning district that establishes new height rules across most of its campus for buildings that are considered hospitals under state law.
Existing rules allow certain on-campus buildings west of Eighth Street North to be up to 30-feet tall, but the proposal would increase the height limit of new hospital buildings in the proposed district to “six stories.”
The current height limit for some NCH buildings east of Eight Street North is “three stories within 42 feet,” a city document shows.
If the proposed district is approved, NCH would demolish the Telford Education Center, an approximately 80-foot tall, three-story building west of Eighth Street North, and replace it with a new, six-story freestanding cardiac center building that could be approximately 100-feet tall, said Damon Romanello, CEO of Studio+, an architecture company.
The proposed NCH Heart Institute building,tentatively scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024, is projected to cost $150 million, said Paul Hiltz, president and CEO of NCH.
“As Naples and the surrounding communities grow and evolve, healthcare services will need to grow and evolve as well,” he said during a City Council meeting on Monday.
Dr. Robert Cubeddu, president of the NCH Heart Institute, said it would integrate all the subspecialties within cardiology such as surgery, labs, cardiac imaging, clinics, and rehabilitation.
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