MORGANTOWN — “There is no one on earth that wants to move more than I do,” Milan Puskar Health Right Executive Director Laura Jones said Thursday. “This has been the longest, most frustrating experience.”
Jones’ comments came in response to Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom, who, a day earlier, publicly expressed his own frustrations with the time it’s taken to relocate Health Right’s free clinic on Spruce Street to its new home on Scott Avenue.
The county has contributed $200,000 to what’s likely to be a $2.3 million undertaking to purchase and significantly renovate and expand a new facility that will be considered an adjacent addition to the Hazel’s House of Hope campus.
The process has been plagued with delays and setbacks and is more than two years beyond the 2023 deadline that came with the initial $800,000 in financing from the city of Morgantown.
“I know that it’s hard for people on the outside to understand what’s going on, and you might think we are dragging our feet, but I can assure you that is not the case,” Jones said. “It’s frustrating that Tom makes it seem like somehow we’re doing something underhanded or we took money that we weren’t supposed to take or didn’t do what we were supposed to do with the money. That is not the case at all.”
She continued.
“We’re doing the finishing work that will allow us to have the shortest downtime possible and get moved from one place to another and be able to see patients again. What everyone has to understand is that we don’t have a lot of resources. We are still running our agency at full speed and trying to get our people trained on the new phone system and the new e-card system and complete this other finishing work. We can’t afford to not have that kind of stuff done in advance because soon after we move, we have to be up, running and ready to go. It’s not like we have a crew that can go get everything set up for us and we’ll just move in and start seeing patients.”
The process has been substantially delayed by a number of factors, Jones explained, from post-COVID delays procuring materials and equipment to months-long utility right of way issues caused by the sale of a neighboring property, to recent storms that forced contractor March-Westin to redo portions of the building’s roof.
With every new setback, Jones said she remained optimistic the project would get back on track. That optimism, she continued, likely contributed to some of the outside frustration.
“I think the thing that maybe I shouldn’t have done during all this was be so optimistic that we would make these deadlines. I was just so optimistic every time we set a new goal that we were going to make that goal. I would say, ‘Oh, we’re going to move in two months,’ and then something unexpected would happen. Every time we take a step forward, something happens and we have to take a step back and readdress an issue.”
All that being said, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
The process of getting the new building through the various required inspection and licensure processes is underway. Health Right has set an October date to walk stakeholders and funding partners through its future home.
While Jones admits her outlook on the overall process may have been a bit optimistic, her enthusiasm for the new facility hasn’t wavered.
While smaller overall than the current Spruce Street location, the new facility is optimized in a way that provides more functional space.
Some of that square footage will be turned into a licensed behavioral health center.
“It will allow us to see more patients and it will allow us to see more mental health patients. That’s really important. We desperately need to expand. We are very concerned about what’s going to happen with the Medicare cuts. We understand that some states are sending out letters already to say people will be cut off from Medicaid, or the Affordable Care Act credits are going away. These folks are going to need a place to go.”
In the end, she said, the Health Right team remains committed and excited about the move.
“We’ve all been up there, and we’re all like, ‘I can’t wait until we move.’ It’s just different. It’s going to be really nice.”
