GRH purchasing the former Moda Health facility

Grande Ronde Hospital should soon have a strong presence in downtown La Grande. The hospital is close to finalizing the purchase of the Moda Health building at 909 Adams Ave.

“It is a great fit for us. It is a beautiful space,” said Mardi Ford, Grande Ronde Hospital’s director of communications and marketing.

The three-level, 33,000-square-foot building would provide badly needed space for GRH. The building will be much for offices and classrooms, which will allow the main GRH campus on Sunset Drive to allocate more room for clinical operations, said Paul Shorb, senior director of provider services at Grande Ronde Hospital.

The building formerly housed the Oregon Dental School College of Dental Sciences, which closed its program in La Grande in March because of falling enrollment. The dental school had been a collaboration of Moda Health, Oregon Institute of Technology and Eastern Oregon University since 2005, offering associate of applied science degrees in dental hygiene.

Although the building no longer has a dental school, Moda employees working in medical claims still work there. Moda’s president and CEO, Robert Goatee, said in a news release that all Moda employees working in the La Grande building will be able to stay with the company.

“All of our current employees will have opportunities to continue with Moda, and we anticipate many to take advantage of our company’s innovative work-from-home policy,” he said.

La Grande City Manager Robert Strope said GRH’s drive to purchase the building is a positive development for the city and the downtown area.

“It’s very exciting to learn that (Grande Ronde Hospital is) going to go ahead and acquire that property,” he said.

He said that along with the opening of Market Place Family Foods and the increased business activity at the Market Place Underground nearby, the move is particularly encouraging in light of recent negatives like JCPenney closing its retail store downtown.

“We have a lot of excellent space in our downtown area,” Strope said. “I’m really excited to see the potential for activity at this end of town, particularly when we’re seeing some closures downtown.”

Shorb anticipates that the sale of the building will be completed in about a month and that hospital employees may begin moving into the building by late June. He said that relatively little work would be needed to prepare the building, which was constructed about a dozen years ago, for hospital employees.

“It is very functional, new and the retrofitting that would be needed would be minimal,” Shorb said.

He noted that it is already wired with fiber optics from the same vendor the hospital uses and has plenty of room for work spaces, training labs, classrooms, business and social meetings.

Grande Ronde Hospital representatives were approached by Moda earlier to see if they were interested in obtaining the building. Members of the hospital’s board of trustees then met late April 19 to tour the building. Grande Ronde Hospital Board of Trustees Chair Brad Trisler said that it was quickly apparent that the building space would be a great fit for the hospital.

“We knew it would be the answer to our needs,” Trisler said.

The cost of the proposed purchase has not been released. Trisler did say, though, that the cost of buying the building would be much less than what it would take to build a similar steel frame building. He said the purchase makes “sound fiscal sense.”

Trisler said buying the Moda Health building will give the hospital a strong downtown presence.

“We are looking forward to being a vital part of the downtown core and the daily interactions that will naturally occur between our employees and the businesses and people located there,” Trisler said.

Ford echoed this sentiment.

“This will increase our visibility. Our goal has been to go downtown. We are all pretty excited,” Ford said.

Contact Dick Mason at 541-786-5386 or dmason@lagrandeobserver.com. Follow Dick on Twitter @lgoMason.