Mayo Clinic is not in a hurry to shake up the market for medical care in the St. Croix Valley.
Mayo Clinic going slow on potential clinic in Hudson, Wis.
Health giant has permit, but isn't in hurry to build.
March 8, 2019 at 10:56PM
Last year, Mayo asked the plan commission in Hudson, Wis., for a conditional-use permit to develop a 100,000-square-foot medical facility on about 9 acres of vacant land near Interstate 94.
The move was seen as a competitive threat to some health systems in the Twin Cities, but Mayo Clinic's chief financial officer said a facility in Hudson isn't currently on the list of capital projects at Mayo.
"There are currently no plans to build anything in Hudson," Dennis Dahlen, the CFO, said during an interview. "The land is still there. It's there for future expansion, should that be a location we wanted to grow into."
Hudson is located on the St. Croix River, about 30 miles east of Minneapolis. Mayo Clinic has a large network of hospitals and clinics that extends across southern Minnesota into Iowa and Wisconsin, including operations in 14 Wisconsin communities to the east of Hudson.
Called Mayo Clinic Health System, the network doesn't include Mayo's flagship medical center in Rochester. The division reported a jump in operating income last year to about $69 million.
In paperwork filed with the Hudson Plan Commission in February 2018, Mayo said it wanted the land zoned to allow for a building with 60 to 75 clinic rooms, six to eight operating rooms and four procedure suites. Two rooms would allow patients to stay overnight after surgery, but not more than 24 hours.
The Plan Commission approved the zoning request, Mayo said last year. In the recent interview, Dahlen said the clinic would need to take several more steps before moving forward with the idea, including a market survey to determine whether demand exists.
"There was really never any plan to build anything in Hudson," he said. "There's not a plan not to build one, either. All that was done was, land was purchased for a potential site in Hudson."
Mayo is making $1 billion worth of strategic investments in capital projects, including a $648 million expansion of its medical campus in Phoenix and a $190 million vertical expansion of the Gonda Building in Rochester. The clinic currently is expanding its hospital in Barron, Wis., which is about 75 miles northeast of Hudson.
Bloomington-based HealthPartners has substantial operations in western Wisconsin, including Hudson Hospital, Amery Medical Center and Westfields Hospital in New Richmond. There's also competition in western Wisconsin from Minneapolis-based Allina Health System, which operates a hospital in River Falls. Last year, Minneapolis-based Fairview Health Services announced the expansion of its affiliation with a hospital in Grantsburg, Wis.
Christopher Snowbeck • 612-673-4744 Twitter: @chrissnowbeck
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