Star Tribune
$5 billion redo of Mayo Clinic’s campus will reshape Rochester skyline
Mayo Clinic is pledging to transform hospital medicine through a $5 billion expansion of its Rochester campus that will reshape the city’s skyline and bring care to patients — rather than the other way around.
The clinic over six years will erect five buildings, including a nine-story patient care complex that will connect via a “skybridge” to the existing campus. Mayo hosted Gov. Tim Walz and other dignitaries Tuesday to publicly launch the project.
A key goal is to create “neighborhoods” where patients with similar conditions receive all of their care, rather than segmented departments that have patients walking and wheeling across campus for consultations and tests, said Dr. Craig Daniels, a physician leader of the project. Online tools will prepare patients for admission before they arrive and acquaint them with the hospital’s relocated entrance.
“Some patients really have a once-in-a-lifetime journey to Mayo Clinic and they arrive here with concern, with fear,” he said. “We need to honor their arrival by replacing that fear with hope and confidence that we are doing the right things for them.”
The expansion fulfills Mayo’s commitment to Destination Medical Center, a plan hatched a decade ago to maintain Rochester as a global health care destination. Minnesota pledged $585 million in state, Olmsted County, and Rochester taxpayer funds over 20 years for civic improvements to reach that goal.
“We are seeing, today, the reality of that,” said Rochester Mayor Kim Norton, who served in the Legislature when the Destination Medical Center was created in 2013. “We are seeing the manifestation of that commitment that we all made together.”
The expansion comes at a challenging time, even for Mayo, with its international reputation of care for complex and mysterious diseases. While the health system is showing signs of economic recovery, its operating income declined by 50% last year because of rising staffing costs and capacity problems that left its hospitals stuck with patients who couldn’t be discharged on time.
Daniels said the project is the largest in Mayo’s history but similar in goals to the invention of a pneumatic tube system a century ago that conveyed medical records across campus and inspired team-based patient care. It is part of a broader initiative to replace Mayo buildings that are outdated for modern technology.
Upgrades are underway at Mayo’s hospitals in Mankato, La Crosse, Wis., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Jacksonville, Fla.
“We need to build new space and invest in technology for our patients and for our staff,” Daniels said. “We can’t ask them to continue to practice in a difficult environment. We need to give them the tools and resources they need in order to make health care fantastic again.”
Construction will start in early 2024 and include demolition of existing Mayo buildings. The health system still needs support from the city of Rochester for some traffic designs, including the permanent closures of 3rd Avenue SW. and 4th Avenue SW. between Center Street and 2nd Street SW.
Parking will shift during different stages of the project, but should increase to 1,300 spaces in the end with the construction of two new ramps. A Mayo spokesperson said the health system will keep neighbors updated about the project, including the construction of the patient complex that will thread between two downtown churches.
The project doesn’t require a legislative exemption to Minnesota’s hospital bed construction moratorium, because it will keep Mayo under its current licensed capacity of 2,059 beds, Daniels said.
Inpatient care will continue for now at the St. Mary’s campus on the west edge of town, but not at the existing Rochester Methodist Hospital building downtown. Plans for that building are uncertain, but it is likely to host clinical trials, outpatient clinics and medical classrooms, said Dr. Amy Williams, Mayo’s executive dean of practice.
The old Lourdes High School building downtown will be converted into a logistics center and connected to the Mayo campus by a tunnel.
Mayo was heavily invested in planning and preparation for the project last spring when it threatened to pull the plug if lawmakers passed legislation it opposed. The gambit worked for Mayo, disrupting plans to give Minnesota’s nurses more direct authority over their staffing levels and to create an affordability board that could penalize high-cost hospitals.
Walz negotiated alternatives with lawmakers following Mayo’s threat, and was on hand Tuesday to celebrate the construction project that will support Minnesota’s largest employer.
Mayo has made Rochester one of the most “important places on the planet,” and this expansion will produce health care discoveries that people haven’t yet envisioned, Walz said. “Mayo is skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.”
Hospital leaders have bemoaned the shortage of transfer options when patients are ready to leave — which results in the boarding of patients in inpatient beds and backlogs that last for hours or days in emergency rooms. Minnesota gave $18 million in financial relief to hospitals just for the amount of boarding they reported in the first five months of 2023.
Williams said the project will help by investing in personal health technologies that allow more patients to recover from hospitalizations at home with monitoring by Mayo caregivers. Mayo wants to “blur the lines” separating inpatient, outpatient and online care on its new campus, she added, because patient needs often get missed in the handoff from one to the other.
If that blended approach works, it could offer lessons to other hospitals that reduce costs and improve care, she added. “We’re hoping this is a learning lab for the world.”
Many residents in the apartments next to the proposed nightclub are visiting workers such as travel nurses or farm laborers, he said. “It makes no sense to have a nightclub that has concerts next to a place where people need to rest to work in the community,” Zuleger said.
He has said that the company also partners with addiction centers and women’s shelters to house Willmar’s most vulnerable residents, and some of these tenants would be too close for comfort to the new nightclub.
Instead of a nightclub, the site should be used for a Somali community center where children from the nearby apartments can play, Zuleger said. Willmar, a city of about 21,000 people, is about 24% Hispanic and 11% Black, with 16% of the city born overseas, double the average rate in the rest of Minnesota. About 43% of the company’s tenants are Somali, and Zuleger called them his “best-paying renters.”
But Doug Fenstra, the real estate agent helping sell the property at 951 High Av., said he had never heard about the possibility of a Somali community center before Zuleger brought up the idea at an October planning commission meeting.
On Wednesday, the planning commission deliberated whether a nightclub would fit the character of the neighborhood. They noted that there was already a brewery in the area.
They passed a motion granting the conditional-use permit.
“DHS and our state and federal partners have seen evidence that kickbacks are happening in Minnesota,” Inspector General Kulani Moti said in a statement. “That’s why we brought an anti-kickback proposal to the Minnesota Legislature last session. We will continue to work with the Legislature next session on ways to strengthen the integrity of our public programs.”
Nuway Alliance, one of the state’s largest nonprofit substance use disorder treatment providers, pays up to $700 a month for someone’s housing while they are in intensive outpatient treatment, the organization’s website states. The site lists dozens of sober housing programs clients can choose from.
Nuway leaders said they got an inquiry from the government about two and a half years ago indicating they are conducting a civil investigation into the housing model.
But officials with the nonprofit said in an email they believe what they are doing is legal and clients need it. More than 600 people are using their assistance to stay in recovery residences, Nuway officials stated. They said having a safe, supportive place to stay is particularly important for the vulnerable people they serve, more than half of whom reported being homeless in the six months before they started treatment.
Health plans knew about, approved and even lauded their program, Nuway leaders said, noting that health insurer UCare even gave it an award.
“The state of Minnesota has been fully aware of our program for a decade,” the organization said. “Since payors are fully aware of, and support the program, we struggle to see how anyone could argue it is improper, let alone fraudulent.”
Mounds View, the first Minnesota city to require homeowners to discharge racist language buried in deeds before they sell their homes, is celebrating a milestone: at least 100 homeowners have completed the process.
Officials say discharging the language is a symbolic step, but an important one.
“How could we call ourselves an inclusive community with the words ‘This home shall not be sold to a non-white person’ buried in the deeds?” Mayor Zach Lindstrom said at the state of the city address Monday.
Racially restrictive covenants, found in deeds around the Twin Cities and Minnesota, were legally enforceable tools of racial segregation for the first half of the 20th century. They barred homes’ sale to, and sometimes even occupancy by, anyone who wasn’t white until 1948, when they became unenforceable. Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota research project uncovering these covenants, has found more than 33,000 of them in Minnesota, including more than 500 in Mounds View.
Many local cities have partnered with Just Deeds, a coalition that helps cities and their residents learn about and discharge covenants. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law allowing homeowners to add language to their deeds that discharges racist covenants but doesn’t erase them from the record. Earlier this year, Mounds View was the first to pass an ordinance requiring it. The city is also helping residents navigate the process.
Just because these covenants are no longer enforceable doesn’t mean they haven’t had long-lasting consequences, Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice project director, said at a Mounds View City Council meeting this summer: Minneapolis homes with racial covenants are worth 15% more than those without, she said. And neighborhoods with covenants remain the whitest parts of the Twin Cities.
Mounds View residents Rene and Steven Johnson were troubled to learn from Mapping Prejudice that their house, and many homes in their neighborhood, had racially restrictive covenants on them. It took some effort, including a trip to the Ramsey County Recorder’s Office, to find the document, which not only contained race restrictions but barred unmarried couples from owning the home.
The couple got their covenant discharged, and educated the city about the process, Rene Johnson said. That helped lead to the ordinance requiring covenants to be discharged before sale.
