What’s going on with the vandalized old KGH hospital building?
The old Kennewick General Hospital was once the shining centerpiece of a fast growing community. Today it appears to be falling into disrepair with downed trees on the lot and a dead lawn.
The 70-year-old building has been sitting vacant for more than a year as it changed hands in order to become the future site for some of the Benton and Franklin county behavioral health center’s services.
Part of the issue with the upkeep of the property is that the irrigation well being used to water the property dried up before it was bought by the county. By then, officials decided it would be too expensive to continue to use city water and lawn maintenance was partially discontinued.
Since buying the property, the county has been working to determine what could be done, but much of the greenspaces around the building already were dead or dying because of a summer of intense heat last year.
Just weeks after closing on the facility, it was also hit by vandals who did thousands of dollars worth of damage. Last November the county estimated vandals and burglars were causing $3,000 to $4,000 per day in damage stripping copper pipes, causing flooding, triggering fire extinguishers and breaking cabinets.
After breaking 15 windows and five doors, the county moved to board up the windows to prevent further damage.
Benton County now has a small team that works at the facility, but their to-do list is lengthy, Assistant County Administrator Matt Rasmussen recently told Benton and Franklin county commissioners during an update at a bi-county meeting Monday.
“We are working on the KGH facility a little bit, we have two maintenance facilities people working there full time,” Rasmussen said. “They’ve been working really hard to clean up the facility, get the grounds cleaned up, remove the old signage and debris and anything that was damaged from vandalism and water damage.”
They’re also working on getting the facility’s HVAC systems functioning again, in order to keep it in better shape through the winter, Rasmussen said.
The goal is to get ahead of many issues with the property, so that when the renovation build gets ready to begin, they won’t have to focus first on repairs.
“It isn’t just sitting there falling apart, we’ve got a crew out there taking care of it and maintaining it and trying to get things functioning that way when the design team comes in it isn’t just an old, abandoned falling apart building,” he told the commissioners.
The county expects to soon award a contract for renovation of both the old KGH facility and the Bruneau Avenue buildings that will serve as the joint home of the newly named Columbia Valley Center for Recovery.
As the renovation project gets underway, the county also will be looking into a new source of water for the building. It’s unclear how the schedule will break down with three of the four main services slated for the Bruneau facility, but Rasmussen told commissioners he expects to have early plans and renderings over the next few months.
Because the county is awarding a design-build process, that means some work can start while the overall designs are being finalized. The entire process is expected to take up to two years, but some portions of the services could open sooner.
Comprehensive Healthcare has been selected as the service provider for the facilities and will help shape the vision for the process.
The Benton-Franklin Behavioral Health Advisory Committee also expects to be nearing decisions soon on a 23-hour sobering center, which could go in at Lourdes in Pasco or another Tri-Cities location within months, and a potential Crisis Response Team that is dispatched out with first responders.
This story was originally published September 26, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
