This $70M health campus in Redding could mean new types of specialty medical care

After years of planning, delays and approvals, dirt could start moving for construction of Dignity Health’s $70 million Regional Cancer Center later this year.

“We hope to break ground in the fall. I know that’s pretty generic, but we think the fall is a reasonable time frame,” Mercy Medical Center Redding President Todd Smith recently told the Record Searchlight.

Dignity Health Northern California Division spokeswoman Allison Hendrickson said they are working on finishing the construction documents phase of the project and when that’s done, they will submit the plans to the city of Redding’s building department.

Hendrickson said that is likely to happen in mid-May.

In early February, the project got a boost when Tri Counties Bank donated $100,000 to Mercy Foundation North, which has been raising money for the cancer center.

Jake Mangas, president of Mercy Foundation North, said the foundation has raised $9 million of the $10 million goal for the project.

Smith said Dignity’s parent company, CommonSpirt Health, has allocated $70 million for the project.

“They asked the foundation to raise a certain piece and they are covering the rest,” Smith said.

The cancer center will be built on property south of the Cypress Avenue Bridge on Sacramento River-front property behind the Cobblestone Shopping Center , just north of the Nur Pon Open Space, formerly known as the Henderson Open Space.

Impact of COVID

The project first came before the city in August 2017 and was approved after repeated delays spurred by local labor groups that demanded an environmental impact report be done. Eventually, the city of Redding agreed to the group’s demands and conducted an EIR on the project.

The City Council approved the project in June 2020, three months after the world was essentially shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID, it rocked our world and pretty much all capital projects like this were at a minimum delayed, if not put on hold until we got through that two, two-and-a-half-year span of dealing with that. We were focused on taking care of the people in our community and there was a lot,” Smith said of COVID’s impact on the North State.

From health campus to cancer center

The original concept for the project was a health campus called Dignity North State Pavilion that included administrative offices, diagnostic imaging, family medicine and pediatrics, orthopedics, a pharmacy, physical therapy, physician offices and women's health and wellness.

But Smith said over time, they realized that Dignity was already offering in the community many of the components and services in a wellness campus.

“And then we kind of reevaluated what we were doing down there and came to the realization pretty quickly that we have cancer care at multiple sites and to pull that together and really focus on the community need and the patients getting all those services in one building really made a lot more sense,” Smith said.

The Regional Cancer Center will be 45,000- to 50,000-square feet, about one-third the size of the health campus that was originally planned.

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Robert Folden, chief operating officer of Dignity Health Northern California, said this will be the first time in Redding “when our medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, nursing staff, all of those disciplines that support oncology, will be under the same roof.”

Folden added, “So our whole goal was let’s make the most of what is a bad experience and let’s wrap ourselves around this patient."

Folden explained that the cancer center also will have extra space for specialty providers to come in and give care.

“So we think of things like GYN oncology that we don’t provide in the community today. That might be a service that we can have someone provide,” he said.

Folden said the building will be designed to incorporate its surroundings.

“The whole effort is to incorporate the natural setting, using the river, has a sort of healing influence. There are going to be elements in the building to tie the two together,” he said.

David Benda covers business, development and anything else that comes up for the USA TODAY Network in Redding. He also writes the weekly "Buzz on the Street" column. He’s part of a team of dedicated reporters that investigate wrongdoing, cover breaking news and tell other stories about your community. Reach him on X, formerly Twitter @DavidBenda_RS or by phone at 1-530-338-8323. To support and sustain this work, please subscribe today

This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Dignity's Regional Cancer Center in Redding may break ground this fall