QUINCY — A request for bids from construction firms to build the new Quincy Valley Medical Center could be issued by mid-December. In addition, QVMC board members are scheduled to vote on a resolution to sell the bonds to finance the project at the Dec. 19 meeting. Hospital board members received an update on the project at the regular meeting Nov. 28.

Joe Kunkel, the consultant working with QVMC officials on the project, said hospital officials will make a presentation Dec. 1 to the Capital Projects Advisory Review Board, asking that the hospital district be allowed to waive some of the requirements of the bid process. If the request is allowed, the district will be able to hire a contractor immediately, Kunkel said.

“We’ll do a 20-minute presentation, then they get to pepper us with questions for 20 minutes, and they vote on the spot,” Kunkel said. “So I’m very confident that our application will be approved - there’s no reason that it shouldn’t be approved. But until it’s done, it’s not done.”

The district will have the option to reapply if the original request is rejected.

“If they say no, then we would get on to the next hearing because they would say no for a reason,” Kunkel said. “And we would address that, if they say, ‘Well, we weren’t comfortable with this part of your application.’”

If the application is approved, Kunkel said the request for proposals from contractors will be issued immediately.

“Then our selection committee will go through a process of finding a general contractor. And we continue to get a lot of interest around this project,” Kunkel said.

A consultant has been hired to evaluate the hospital’s existing equipment and determine what will still be usable in the new hospital. Hospital officials, staff and architects on the project will be working with scale models of the possible design to come up with ideas on how the building will fit together, Kunkel said.

“We’re going to start the blocking and stacking, (determining) relationships of ER to (diagnostic) imaging to wound care to the clinics, all those parts and pieces. We’re going to start playing with those things on site, and try to maximize those things. Which is very exciting - this is some of the most fun, because we’ll do some actual tabletop (designs) with scaled (models) and we’ll start to move them around.”

Hospital district residents approved a construction bond for the project in August, authorizing up to $55 million. Jim Nelson, senior vice president for D.A. Davidson, a district consultant on financing, said the plan is to sell about $46 million of the bonds in February 2023. The rest would be sold in January 2024 or January 2025.

He estimated property owners would pay about 43 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value in the first year of the bond, with rates projected to go up to 48 cents per $1,000 in the third year, dropping after that to about 41 cents per $1,000.

If the hospital board approves the bond resolution Dec. 19, the project will be submitted to bond rating agencies for their review in early January, Nelson said.

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached at [email protected].