Likely site for hospital is selected
Location near GHS is No. 1

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Barring any unforeseen problems, the new Gallup Indian Medical Center will be going up next to Gallup High School.

Gallup City Manager Eric Honeyfield said the selection committee that vetted 11 potential sites for a new $300 million hospital for the Indian Health Service, to replace the 1960s-era hospital at the corner of College Drive and Nizhoni Boulevard, released its rankings Thursday morning.

At the top of the list was a plot of land owned by the Menapace family along Rico Street, just north of the high school.

A plot near Rehoboth, just east of the town, came in second, another on a piece of the municipal golf course, third.

McKinley County Commissioner Earnest Becenti Jr., a member of the selection committee, said the flat land, surrounding utility infrastructure and transportation access make the plot a good choice.

With an average of two IHS patients flown out of Gallup a day, proximity to the city's municipal airport, just down the street from the site along Highway 66, was another important factor.

The committee's choices please the city as well.

"We're delighted because they're either in or near the city," said Honeyfield. "Mission accomplished."

The plots by the high school and golf course are both in Gallup. The Rehoboth site sits a few miles outside city limits. A few of the other sites were farther away.

Honeyfield was happy with the top choice because a new construction project the size of the IHS hospital will mean millions of dollars in tax revenue. Gross receipts taxes, he said, would equal three percent of the project's cost. With the new hospital predicted to cost $300 million, that could mean $9 million in taxes alone for the city.

There's still no guarantee IHS will build its new hospital by the high school, though.

Now that the selection committee has ranked the sites, IHS staff from Dallas and Washington, D.C., have to take a closer look at the top choice to make sure there's nothing standing in the way building a hospital there.

Gallup Indian Medical Center CEO Floyd Thompson said that will mean several studies and surveys, from soil tests to archeological clearance.

Becenti said they'll also have to find out if the property owners will be willing to hold the site for five years, since it may take that long to secure the federal funding they'll need to build the hospital.

If it doesn't work out, they move down the list.

"Something must be wrong with the first site to go to the second site and subsequently the next," the city manager said.

Jonathan Flannery, with IHS's local facilities office, said a final decision on the No. 1 choice could arrive by the end of this month.

The new hospital, likely to double the square feet of the current facility, will help IHS keep up with the trend in modern medicine from inpatient care to outpatient care, CEO Thompson said. The volume of outpatient care at the hospital has grown more than six-fold since 1960, he said.