Baptist Health South Florida won approval for a seven-story, 100-bed hospital in Sunrise — a city with a population of about 90,000 but no hospital.
The Sunrise City Commission on Tuesday approved a site plan for the Baptist Health Sunrise Hospital and a special exception allowing hospital operations on the vacant 25-acre development site at 12401 West Oakland Park Boulevard.
“We’re going to spend probably $500 million in Sunrise,” Bo Boulenger, president and CEO of Baptist Health, said at the commission meeting. “We’re probably going to hire at least 600 employees.”
Two years ago, the Sunrise City Commission voted to sell the 25-acre, city-owned development site to Baptist Health for $14.3 million. The commission conditioned its approval on delivery of a site plan for a 100-bed hospital.
Coral Gables-based Baptist Health, a not-for-profit, faith-based hospital system, beat a competitive joint bid for the 25-acre site from two tax-supported hospital systems, Broward Health and Memorial Healthcare.
City commissioners who favored the bid by Baptist Health cited unkept promises by Broward Health to build a hospital elsewhere in Sunrise, at Pine Island Road and Oakland Park Boulevard, where Broward Health acquired about 8 acres in 2002.
Sunrise agreed to sell the 25-acre site to Baptist Health for about seven times the price the city paid for the land. In 1997, the Sunrise paid Lennar Homes $1.95 million for the site, according to property records.
In late 2022, the city restored an existing marsh area on the northern side of the vacant development site. Baptist Health plans to build its seven-story hospital and a five-story parking garage on the southern side of the site.
Multiple development proposals have emerged since Sunrise bought the high-profile site on the northeast corner of the interchange of Oakland Park Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway.
“That was going to be so many different things in my time, from apartment complexes to office buildings to shopping centers,” said Sunrise Deputy Mayor Joseph A. Scuotto, who has served on the city commission since 1997. “Pretty much everybody wanted to propose something to go on that site.”
Baptist Health Sunrise Hospital is designed as a full-service hospital with 370,000 square feet of interior space encompassing an emergency department, a pharmacy, a laboratory, and a surgery suite as well as facilities for imaging services, critical care, diagnostics, and respiratory therapy. Baptist expects the hospital to have about four ambulance visits per day, according to a city staff report.
The hospital and parking garage are designed to limit noise and light pollution in residential areas east of the development site, the report states. For example, the design of the garage includes an opaque architectural façade on its east side, and the hospital’s ambulance bays, loading zones, and energy plant are positioned on the west side of the site, next to the Sawgrass Expressway.