Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater is moving forward with plans for a new $400 million-plus campus at the northeast corner of Minnesota 36 and Manning Avenue, HealthPartners officials announced Thursday.

The hospital’s new 68-acre campus, which is expected to open in late 2027 or early 2028, will include emergency medicine, advanced critical care, and specialized centers for heart, cancer and orthopedic care.

It’s a major change for the 97-bed hospital, which has been located at the intersection of Churchill and Greeley streets, near Lily Lake, since 1961. The hospital employs about 1,100 people.

The new site will give the hospital room to expand and greater visibility, said Lakeview Hospital President Brandi Lunneborg.

A map showing the site plan for the new Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater. Officials with HealthPartners announced on Thursday that they are moving forward with plans for a new campus at the northeast corner of Minnesota 36 and Manning Avenue. (Courtesy of HealthPartners)

“It’s a fantastic location,” Lunneborg said. “We’re extremely excited about the visibility. It will be a gateway into Stillwater as people come into the community. There’s a lot of growth in the area. It also has all these wonderful natural attributes, and we know that nature and health and healing go hand in hand, so we’re extremely excited about the selection of that property and what that will bring to enhance what we offer at the hospital.”

Lakeview purchased the land in 2017, but put its expansion plans on hold just two years later. “At the time, we felt that we had more opportunity to use our existing space, and so that was our strategy,” Lunneborg said. “We’ve made adjustments to the space as we’ve gone along.”

The volume of patients at Lakeview has grown so much post-COVID “that it just became clear that now is the right time,” Lunneborg said. “Back then, things were different, and we had a little more room to work with, and we just decided to wait and assess at a later date and that time is here.”

One key indicator of growth: the number of emergency-room visits at Lakeview has increased substantially in the past five years.

“Our ER is especially busy,” Lunneborg said. “That’s probably one of the early indicators that we need more space. We’ll be close to 20,000 emergency room visits by the end of the year, which is a lot. Five years ago, we were probably closer to 16,000.”

Growth in the neighboring cities of Lake Elmo and Mahtomedi and in western Wisconsin helped spur the decision to build a new hospital. “The service area has been continuing to grow as we look at where new community members are starting to live,” Lunneborg said. “We want to make sure that we are there to provide services for patients locally, as we are a nice community hospital with a great offering of services that keeps people close to home and not having to always travel into the cities for their care.”

The east metro and western Wisconsin communities that Lakeview serves “continue to grow and change,” she said. “For example, the number of people over age 65 is projected to increase 20 percent over the next five years. The need for coordinated services for chronic illnesses such as cardiology, cancer and orthopedic care will also increase.”

Lakeview also plans to relocate some services from its Curve Crest campus “that make more sense to have closer to the hospital,” Lunneborg said.

Orthopedic service, for example, is a “heavy utilizer of our OR,” she said. “They round on patients, they cover the emergency room. It’s just nice to have those types of specialists very close to where they are providing the majority of their services for the hospital.”

HKS Architects in Chicago will design the new campus in partnership with local architectural firm, BWBR, and engineering firms Dunham, ERA and Loucks.

HKS this year won two American Institute of Architects Healthcare Design Awards — one for Moody Outpatient Center at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the other for AHN Wexford Hospital in Wexford, Pa., according to the company’s website.

“We’re excited to have partners that are national and bring a high level of expertise in building green-field hospitals that really are starting from an open plot of land,” Lunneborg said. “That’s not very typical. Often you’re dealing with a lot of other site constraints, so having someone with that experience is good.”

Mike Boldenow, a principal with the BWBR firm, lives in Stillwater and “knows our service area well,” Lunneborg said. “It’s great to have that marriage of experience outside the Twin Cities and national with lots of health-care experience and those types of hospital builds and someone local who knows us and knows how we live and our community functions and brings that local experience.”

Lakeview officials will seek input from community members and others on the campus design.

“We plan to meet with neighbors and address any questions or concerns that they have because it obviously is a big change for that neighborhood, and they’ll have concerns about traffic and noise and other things,” Lunneborg said. “We want to be a good neighbor. We currently occupy an area in the middle of Stillwater, and we know how to be a good neighbor, so our plan is to involve them and make sure that we can address their concerns along the way and build a good relationship with them now that we’re active on the planning side.”

About a third of the land, on the north side of the property, is marked as “neighborhood connections/landscape buffer” on an aerial site plan shared by Lakeview.

“There are some wetlands and some very specific restrictions to the site to meet the ecological needs there,” said Lunneborg, noting that about 45 acres of the site can be developed. “We’re not going to disturb certain areas. Our intent is to try and protect a lot of where the natural boundaries are. We need to preserve wetlands, and the setback from Long Lake, and there are a lot of old-growth trees and just some really beautiful space there that we don’t want to disturb. It makes a nice visual and sound buffer for the neighbors in the back, but we haven’t mapped out exactly how far that is.”

Updates on the project, including a construction timeline, community engagement opportunities and on-campus services will be shared in the coming months, she said.

Hospital officials do not have a plan about its 927 W. Churchill St. location.

“We recognize that it is a very integral part of the community, and we want to make sure that we make the right decisions as we get there,” Lunneborg said. “But we have been more focused on nailing down the timeline of the new campus and making sure we were committed to moving forward, so we haven’t spent a lot of time on that yet, but we will. We will be interested in continuing to make sure that that is a valuable part of the community.”

An official groundbreaking for the new site has not yet been scheduled, she said.

Mayor Ted Kozlowski said he was “absolutely excited” to hear the hospital has a solid opening date.

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