Arlington County Government, VA Board Wrap-Up, 3 Dec 2018

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From YouTube: County Board Wrap-Up: Virginia Hospital Center Expansion

Description

After a lengthy public process, and a deferral this fall, the Board voted to approve Virginia Hospital Center’s expansion

A

Hello I'm Terry O'donnell, and this is County Board wrap-up, our monthly look at the key decisions. The Arlington County Board is made that affect you. Your neighborhood and our community with us here today is County Board, Chair Katie crystal and board vice-chair Christian Dorsey. Thank you both for joining us today. Now the board took a couple of big redevelopment. Projects at its November meeting, gave the county manager some guidance for the fiscal year 2020 budget, and we looked ahead to the 2019 Virginia General Assembly legislative session.

A

So let's get right into it and we'll start off with the Virginia hospital Center expansion. Now we talked about this last month, I believe maybe two months ago, and you decided at that time to kind of just take a step back and reevaluate a little delay that decision. But we went forward at this meeting what happened to help you may come to it absolutely.

B

So the decision in September was a deferral with some very specific guidance to the hospital. We believed we knew. This was a community process that unfortunately had not yielded consensus. Not all of our community processes do what the board felt that was clear, that the hospital was not meeting the basic threshold of good design that is respectful and integrated into the surrounding neighborhood.

B

We didn't believe, however, that a few more months of community noodling was any more likely to lead to consensus on that, and so we came up with I'd, say more prescriptive than usual guidance to the hospital about targets who wanted them to hit to attain a couple of core principles, breaking up what felt like a really massive block facing the neighborhood and introducing more light air and pedestrian connectivity through the site, thus making it better integrate with the neighborhood.

B

So what they came back to us with were some new designs that sought to at least in part- and that was the rub addressed- that that relatively narrow guidance and a narrow majority, the board did decide to move forward on the plan. At this point. So.

A

This seemed to address the community's concerns. Some of the concerns that you heard from the neighborhood. It.

C

Did it didn't get all the way there as a few things do and there going to be some people who are definitely impacted more than others by the hospital's expansion, particularly with location of traffic lights, and we think that we can mitigate some of those concerns as we get to those final levels of design, but ultimately I think the the narrow board majority did agree that it had very much met that met the spirit of what we'd intended, if not the letter, and given all of the constraints that we were dealing with, it got as close as it possibly could to meeting our goals and objectives, and hopefully now we can move to a better place.

C

A

Right now, what does this expansion really mean for Arlington and it's health care services? Absolutely.

B

So you know some of those questions could be best answered by the hospital center itself and they were in our I. Think six and a half hour public hearing back in September. They had a great many employees making the case for why this expansion, which will take up about five and a half acres additional to their campus, was so sorely needed.

B

But at a high level it is going to include an outpatient building that will allow them to move a number of functions to this new site, thus freeing up more acute care spaces in the primary hospital area and and and meet the needs of parking for the whole site in this part, so that they can again free more area for hospital uses and, and they hope, introduce some predictability to the flow of where to park.

B

Right now, which is frankly, a current log jam which can have spillover consequences for the neighborhood and certainly as the hospital is arguing anyway, at least impacting patient care. Now.

A

I know it's part of this: the county also acquired that the hospital actually acquired the Edison property. What what is the county getting in return for that money?.

C

So two key things that are very much hot commodities in Arlington County. So you know as part of this, we opted to take the karlon Springs property on which the hospital's urgent care center currently sits, and once we value this transaction. So what the Edison property is worth, we will subtract out what the karlon Springs property is worth and any balance will be either cash or other property that the hospital holds that our Linton may choose to to take advantage of. So those details.

C

We still have about 90 days before those get worked out, what the what the valuation and what the exact exchanges are. But we now know that we'll be parting with Edison and we'll be getting property in a part of the county that we need, and probably some some cash now.

A

Many in the community we're hopeful that the hospital would contribute to some mental health care crisis care for adolescents. What can you tell me about that program? Absolutely.

B

This has been a really important issue area. That's really proceeded along the same track as the land use or parallel to rather the land use issues which is improving mental health care for adults and children in our community. The hospital took a number of steps to improve its facilities for adults and mental health crisis, but it doesn't offer pediatric services, and so there were extensive conversations about if Virginia's hospital center could not offer these services on-site for a variety of reasons.

B

What could we expect of them as a partner in our community in meeting this critical need? Because we do know that children and young people are showing up at Virginia Hospital Center in acute crisis, so as a result of a really extensive set of negotiations and conversations led by our Community Services Board, which is a partnership both a professional staff and citizen leaders, many of whom have personal experience as parents of children or grown children with mental or behavioral health needs.

B

As a result of their extended conversations, the there was a new model created the Virginia Hospital Center will pay for it, funds a clinician to deliver acute services in terms of de-escalation, intensive wraparound placement services and beyond for those young people who do show up in mental health crisis. You know that's sort of the nuts and bolts of it to speak about it from a human face.

B

We heard as board members I know the hospital heard, and certainly our CSB heard from so many parents about how traumatic it is for a young person a child, especially to be hospitalized and to be hospitalized somewhere like VHC, where they don't have the expertise.

B

On-Site will be able now to bring them to our human services center at Sequoia, with a dedicated clinician who has a background in treating their unique needs and get them placed in a much more therapeutic setting and a much less traumatic one I think it's a really good thing for our community really.

A

Valuable service to be offered all right. We will look forward to those changes, but we are gonna, take a short break now and when we return we'll talk about the board's guidance to the manager for his construction of the proposed fiscal year, 2020 budget, as well as the board's approval of a new Elementary School in Westover, stay with us.