Four separate health care businesses on the east side of Salmon Creek have joined hands to build an $8 million shared office complex on the west side of Interstate 5.
Vancouver-based RSV Building Solutions has begun construction of the 30,000-square-foot Salmon Creek Medical Plaza on the northwest corner of Northeast 139th Street and 10th Avenue. The plaza will house medical offices for Adventure Dental, Balanced Physical Therapy, Cascadia Women’s Clinic and Creekside Medical.
The firms pooled resources to leverage financing toward their goal of owning a building, said Debbie Lehner, a spokesperson for the partnership, called Green Awnings LLC, and a physical therapist and owner of Balanced Physical Therapy. “We are individual people that together formed an LLC to acquire the financing we needed to do this,” Lehner said.
The project was launched four years ago when she and the leaders of the other three businesses consulted with RSV’s Ron Frederiksen to explore the concept, said Debbie Marcoulier, president of RSV. Jointly owning the building as an LLC also protects each business from a venture that may prove too risky on an individual level, Lehner said.
“We do not all own the same percentage” of the property,” she said.
Upon its November completion, the building’s ground-floor offices will be occupied by Lehner’s physical therapy practice and the dental clinic. Its second-floor space will house Cascadia and Creekside.
All four businesses are presently on the east side of the freeway and likely would not have moved to the 139th Street site if it weren’t for the $133 million Salmon Creek Interchange project, which includes a freeway overpass at 139th.
Work on that overpass will continue over the next several months. It is set for completion in early 2014, said Heidi Sause, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Department of Transportation.
Lehner called the additional access to the east side of the freeway crucial to practitioners with the four health-care businesses. Without it, the site would possess limited access to the nearest full-service hospital, Legacy Health System’s Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center. Without the new route, approximately eight traffic signals and one roundabout are along the nearest vehicle route to the hospital, along Northeast 134th Street, which is one of Clark County’s most traffic-clogged arterials.
“Cascadia (the women’s clinic) needs to get to the hospital to deliver babies, and so does Creekside,” which is a family practice, Lehner said.
