Southeast San Antonio is on track to get a 50-acre, $100 million medical campus following the purchase of the initial 28-acre tract by Baptist Health System.
The hospital will be built on Brooks City-Base (formerly Brooks Army Base), where Baptist will become the largest tenant.
The sale of the land for the hospital and accompanying medical office buildings represent a huge step forward in a plan that has been in the works for more than two years, says Brooks Development Authority CEO Donald Jakeway. "Timing is everything and we've gotten past the discussions, hypotheticals, and what ifs. Now that we've got a location will all the infrastructure in place to support project of this magnitude, we are ready move forward," he says.
Jakeway says Brooks City-Base is selling and leasing various parts of the former military base in anticipation of the Air Force departing from the base by 2011. Baptist already has an option for some of the land currently occupied by the Air Force. "This project is going to redefine the South Side," says Jakeway. "The hospital and medical buildings will represent hundreds of new jobs for this area, not to mention the addition of world class bioscience, biomedical, academic, environmental, research, and technology centers."
Details of the new hospital are still being worked out, but Mike Zucker, chief development officer of Baptist Health System, says all of the services currently offered at the existing Southeast Baptist Hospital will be transferred to the new facility. "We are still in the planning and development phase, but we anticipate that the staff and services will move over to the new facility. This is going to be a phenomenal site—we see this as an opportunity to build a world-class medical campus," he says.
The BDA is the owner, operator, and developer of Brooks City-Base. It is responsible for maintaining and redeveloping the nearly 1,300-acre complex into a technology center for bioscience, academics, environmental studies, and technical research.
Baptist Health operates five acute-care hospitals in San Antonio that combined have 1,753 licensed beds. The system is owned by Nashville-based Vanguard Health Systems.
—Kathryn Mackenzie