A nonprofit specialty nursing care center for children plans to move its headquarters from Manhattan and consolidate operations employing nearly 700 people on a still-undeveloped site in the South Westchester Executive Park in Yonkers.
Officials at the Elizabeth Seton Pediatric Center in Chelsea said they hope to begin construction on the approximately $158 million project by March 2009 and occupy a five-story, 213,000- square-foot “green building” by April 2011. The organization”™s current lease at 590 Avenue of the Americas expires in 2012 and the owner plans to sell the building, said pediatric center CEO Patricia Tursi.
The proposed center at 300 Corporate Blvd. South would be a business-park neighbor of Cintas Corp., a publicly traded company based in Cincinnati, Ohio, that manufactures and launders corporate uniforms and provides a range of services and supplies to more than 700,000 businesses in North America. As the Business Journal went to press Wednesday, the Yonkers Planning Board was to decide on the company”™s application to build an approximately 60,000-square-foot commercial laundry plant and distribution warehouse on an approximately 5-acre site at 325 Corporate Blvd. South.
Cintas officials last week declined to comment on the company”™s plans and projected employment numbers in Yonkers before the project was approved.
The 6.5-acre site of the proposed pediatric center is included in 56 acres of undeveloped land owned by Elmsford-based Robert Martin Company L.L.C. within the roughly 140-acre South Westchester Executive Park, where most of the developed properties are owned by Mack-Cali Realty Corp. Robert Martin Company is seeking an amendment to the park”™s comprehensive development plan to allow for construction of the children”™s center and a parking garage and for a total potential buildout of 817,000 square feet on the undeveloped acreage.
Sponsored by the Sisters of Charity, the Seton center primarily serves low-income Medicaid recipients in New York City and Westchester County. It is one of only four such facilities in the state that provide specialized and typically long-term care for “medically fragile” children, many of whom come to the center from hospital neonatal or pediatric intensive-care units, Tursi said. The children, who range in age from newborn to 21, have complex conditions that include orthopedic problems, spina bifida, blindness, speech and hearing impairments, brain injury, cerebral palsy, premature birth, failure to thrive, congenital heart disease, chronic lung disease, chromosome, metabolic and respiratory disorders, muscular and neurological diseases and immunodeficiency syndromes.
The Seton center also operates the John A. Coleman School in Manhattan and in White Plains at the former St. Agnes Hospital property on North Street. The White Plains campus has from 120 to 140 students, most of them referred by Westchester school districts, Tursi said. The Coleman School program would be moved to the new Yonkers center.
The center will include 138 residential beds for children, including two for short-stay respite care and 12 to 16 for long-term ventilator-dependent children. Seton center officials plan to build 16 assisted-living studio apartments for retired members of the Sisters of Charity. The nuns will continue their service mission with medically needy children in an intergenerational program that center officials said might be the first of its kind. The center will also house a children”™s diagnostic and treatment clinic and a home health care program for “graduates” and neighboring children with disabilities.
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Tursi said the center averages about 15 deaths a year among the gravely ill children it serves. In her six and a half years at the center, the CEO said, only four patients have lived to 21 and so aged out of the center into adult nursing home care.
Tursi said the nonprofit organization plans to seek tax-exempt financing through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and state agencies while raising 15 percent equity through a capital campaign.
Seton Pediatric Center Project Director Nancy Bullock said the center will be designed and built according to the U.S. Green Building Council”™s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification standards, with terraces on every residential floor, outdoor playgrounds, a band shell, nature trails and gardens. She said center officials will meet with Westchester County officials to discuss extending public bus routes and roads to the site to improve access for staff and visiting families and to reduce vehicular traffic in the area. The center also plans to provide a shuttle service for staff from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority subway terminus in the Bronx.
“It really fits all of our needs,” Bullock said of the Yonkers location. “It”™s a community that”™s reflective of the families we serve and our employees. It”™s a community that”™s open and welcoming. It”™s for the right price.” And the Yonkers site will allow the center to forge stronger relationships with Westchester hospitals while maintaining close ties with its major referring hospitals in Manhattan and Blythedale Children”™s Hospital in Valhalla, she said.
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