RUTLAND — When former Rutland Regional Medical Center President Tom Huebner announced plans for a $16 million office building the year before his recent retirement, he didn’t know he’d have to return to preside over its groundbreaking.
Nor did he figure that’s because the two-story expansion will be named after him.
Huebner joined Gov. Phil Scott, U.S. Rep. Peter Welch and a dozen other local and state leaders Monday in planting shovels at the site of the new Thomas W. Huebner Medical Office Building for specialists now working in crowded or off-campus sites.
“A friend said, ‘Don’t they usually wait until you’re dead?’” Huebner joked to a crowd about the naming honor. “I’m proud to always be associated with this hospital.”
Vermont’s second largest medical center has received state approval for a nearly $24 million project to add the building and 150 parking spaces as well as to renovate some current offices and a 1958 loading dock, replace a 60-year old freight elevator and upgrade site drainage.
The new 36,935-square-foot building adjacent to the hospital will house ear, nose and throat specialists on the first floor and orthopedic and physical medicine and rehabilitation practices on the second.
“We find that the project will benefit the public,” the Green Mountain Care Board said in its approval, “and remedy facility shortcomings that must, in time, be addressed.”
The Vermont Orthopedic Clinic, for example, now sees about 150 patients a day for athletic injuries and hip, knee, ankle, foot, hand and spine surgeries. But its current space that houses 16 clinicians was designed to accommodate just four.
The ear, nose and throat staff, for its part, works in rented space off-campus that can’t fully accommodate wheelchairs.
The project will address those problems as well as replace older X-ray equipment with a digital radiography machine and renovate existing space so the finance and human resource departments can move back after relocating out of the hospital.
RRMC, which has a medical staff of about 250 physicians, expects to save more than $500,000 through the elimination of four off-campus leases by 2023.
The Thomas W. Huebner Medical Office Building, set for completion in 2020, will honor a 28-year administrator whose 2018 retirement sparked a YouTube farewell video featuring much of the staff.
“We had to extend the building 20 feet to accommodate the name,” RRMC board member Joe Kraus joked.
Huebner replied his former colleagues had an alternative fix: “They’re already calling it the Hueb.”
