 Cover photo by John Keith
Bethesda braces for mega hospital and traffic nightmare
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| Corridor Inc. Assistant Editor
Originally published May 2008
Beyond the gates of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Rear Admiral John Mateczun and BRAC Manager David “Ollie” Oliveria are striving to pull off a new kind of medical miracle.
Mateczun and Oliveria have been charged with combining the U.S. Navy facility and Walter Reed Army Medical Center into “the crown jewel” of the military health care system — a mega hospital capable of treating more than 900,000 patients a year, including the nation’s most severely wounded warriors.
The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission ordered the amalgamation amid media reports of deteriorating conditions at Walter Reed’s Washington, D.C. campus.
“This is the largest infrastructure investment in a medical facility ever made within the military health system,” said Mateczun, commander of the joint task force that oversees all military medical facilities in the national capital region.
And the scope of the venture is staggering.
The nearly $900 million construction project will create about 1.2 million square feet of new medical facilities on the Bethesda base, renovate 508,000 square feet of existing space and add 1,800 parking spaces.
 An artist rendering of the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. This is a preliminary rendering of the hospital as it is currently proposed and is subject to change. Courtesy of Joint Task Force National Capital Region - Medical
To pull it off, they say they’ll need the assistance of 4,000 Navy hospital staff, 2,000 Walter Reed staff and nearly 1,000 construction workers. And the entire development will have to occur on the grounds of a busy hospital in the midst of a congested urban core.
“We tell the community, the first couple of months are going to be hectic,” said Oliveria, who predicts construction will begin in June. “As smart as we are, we haven’t thought of everything. There are going to be missteps, but it will get better.”
Oliveria and Mateczun already know what one of their biggest challenges will be — traffic.
Late last year, the Navy began holding public forums to detail the project and collect reaction. Of the 1,300 individuals who submitted written responses to the Navy, most cited traffic as their greatest concern.
 Rear Admiral John Mateczun is overseeing the conversion of the Bethesda hospital into the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Photo by John Keith.
“I don’t think a private company would look at that spot and say, ‘Hey, we should put 2,500 extra people there,’ because they would understand that the traffic implications are not good for that company,” said Phil Alperson, Montgomery County’s BRAC coordinator.
County officials insist Bethesda will need $70 million in short-term projects, including intersection improvements and a pedestrian tunnel linking the Navy base to the Medical Center Metro station, to cope with traffic. The region, they add, might need another $140 million in the long term to ease traffic through such ventures as a ramp linking I-495 to the Navy base.
Those needs were initially overlooked by state and federal authorities.
“At the beginning, we weren’t really on their radar,” Alperson said, noting that Walter Reed was a late addition to the list of BRAC projects. “All the talk was about Aberdeen [Proving Ground] and Fort Meade. I would be at meetings and they wouldn’t even mention us. I would have to raise my hand.”
 Gov. Martin O’Malley, however, earmarked $45 million for intersection improvements around the hospital site. And last month, Navy officials recommended the federal government consider funding some transportation improvements in Bethesda.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — located across from the Bethesda Navy base — warned that extra traffic to Walter Reed could overwhelm multiple Bethesda intersections unless the hospital initiated efforts to discourage employees and visitors from driving.
When NIH began planning to add buildings and employees to its campus in 1995, the National Capital Planning Commission ruled the institutes would have to keep their traffic levels below their 1992 levels.
NIH limited its onsite parking to one space for every two employees, established a transportation management office to help employees form car pools, promoted its $115 monthly incentive for taking transit to work and even formed a bike club.
 BRAC Manager David “Ollie” Oliveria, at the National Naval Medical Center’s rotunda, is working to create the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which will treat 900,000 patients a year. Photo by John Keith.
Today, 45 percent of NIH’s 17,000 Bethesda employees do not drive themselves to work, he said.
Walter Reed probably could not divert such a large percentage of traffic, Oliveria said, noting that hospital staff, patients and visitors have different needs and schedules than many routine commuters.
Mateczun’s task force, however, recently hired a transportation manager to help hospital workers find other ways of commuting. A revised plan for the new Walter Reed, released last month, proposed widening the base’s gates and ring road to prevent base traffic from backing up onto public streets.
Task force members are also looking at ways of changing the new hospital’s business practices to reduce traffic. For example, Walter Reed and the Navy’s Bethesda hospital fill 1.3 million prescription refills annually.
“We are looking at ways to either divert or eliminate that traffic flow by up to 80 percent,” Mateczun said. “On the Bethesda compound that would be between eight and 12 percent of the total traffic.”
Local business leaders are promoting efforts to improve roads, transit access and even Bethesda walkways.
Members of the Greater Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce have discussed distributing one-stop Metro tickets to entice Walter Reed staff and visitors into downtown Bethesda, said Patrick O’Neil, a land use attorney and chamber vice president.
But business and Navy officials estimate few visitors and staff will wander into the business core, which is less than a mile from the Navy base.
 About 45 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s 17,000 Bethesda employees do not drive themselves to work, choosing alternative transportation like the Metro and bicycles, according to Dennis Coleman, NIH’s community liaison director (above). Photo by John Keith.
Increased traffic congestion could limit expected new developments in Bethesda’s business district, White Flint and Woodmont, O’Neil said.
Meanwhile, traffic is just one of the myriad challenges facing the Walter Reed project.
Once construction begins, task force members will have to manage up to 800 construction workers and a stream of equipment coming on site each day, and contain construction emissions and disruptions.
“You are going to make dust and noise and do things that hospitals are not supposed to do,” Oliveria said. “We have very delicate machines. You can’t be bouncing them around while you have patients in.”
The task force will also begin the intricate work of moving departments at Naval Medical to temporary quarters on the Bethesda base while 508,000 square feet of space is renovated. Bethesda-based Clark Construction and Atlanta-based Balfour Beatty Construction will create those temporary quarters as part of the $641 million contract they landed to build the new Walter Reed facility.
“We have a plan. It’s kind of like three-dimensional chess,” Mateczun said. “The complexity requires a lot of human effort to track. There is no program management tool that we know of that is actually able to handle the complexities that we have.”
 The most sophisticated tool the task force could find, Mateczun said, was one that supported the Ballistic Missile Defense System, a proposed system to defend the United States by shooting down enemy missiles in flight. But contractors concluded the Walter Reed project “had a lot more moving parts.”
“It’s easy to get lost in all the day-to-day trials and tribulations,” said Oliveria, adding the task force is spending almost $1 million a day on the Walter Reed project.
“But it’s a tremendously exciting project,” he said. “There are people who stand and look at the Brooklyn Bridge or the Trans-America tower in San Francisco and say my dad or mom was part of that. I hope my kids will come look at this facility and say my dad was part of that.” Fistful of Contracts
By Linda Strowbridge | Corridor Inc. Assistant Editor
Originally published May 2008 Business and government officials alike stress that construction of the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center will not generate major economic growth in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor. Yet the project is expected to pump more than $1 billion into the economy.
“Whenever you have a large federal facility like that, there are a lot of good contracting opportunities,” said Kevin Maloney, president of the Greater Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce.
Construction should trigger $1.3 billion in local sales and create more than 5,500 jobs, a federal analysis of the hospital project concludes. Many of those jobs, however, will be short-term construction positions.
In addition to the obvious construction subcontracts, the military task force overseeing the Walter Reed project will need companies to handle an array of logistics, said Gloria Berthold, president of TargetGov. Those likely will include moving laboratories, clinics and other medical facilities, setting up temporary clinical facilities, installing new computing and telecommunications systems, and managing an enormous amount of medical records.
“There is going to be a huge amount of document-related work,” Berthold said, noting that Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. and National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda will have to combine their records systems when they merge operations in 2011.
Looming transportation projects will also funnel contracts to area businesses, said Walt Townshend, president of the Baltimore-Washington Corridor Chamber of Commerce.
The state has already earmarked $45 million for intersection improvements near the Bethesda hospital site. Montgomery County officials are lobbying for other transportation projects, including a pedestrian tunnel or bridge linking the Walter Reed campus to the Medical Center Metro station. That project alone is expected to cost roughly $20 million. |
