By Eddie Cota

A new medical building going up on the PIH Whittier Hospital campus hit a construction milestone last week. Workers placed the final steel beam, so the building is now fully framed and on track to open in two years.

When it opens, the plan is to fit urgent care, imaging, an outpatient surgery center, an eye clinic, primary care, and specialty offices all under one roof, at Washington Boulevard and Putnam Street.

PIH's planning documents say part of the goal is to move services out of the hospital and into this new building. So some of what opens there might be shifting over from next door, not arriving in Whittier for the first time. PIH hasn't said which services, if any, would make that move.

The building itself

The project sits on a 7.45-acre site at the corner of Washington Boulevard and Putnam Street, across the street from where AME urgent care operates now. Two older commercial buildings on the property were torn down to make room.

Construction is happening in two stages. First, the building and an initial round of parking. Then, more parking on the north side of the property. Once it's all done, the site will have around 600 parking spaces, more than the 526 the city requires, all of it surface parking, no parking structure. The building itself will run entirely on electricity, no natural gas hookups, and it'll have rooftop solar panels and battery storage.

More traffic, no required fixes

The project is expected to add about 3,500 car trips a day to the area. A traffic study looked at nearby intersections and found three that will struggle once the building opens, including the building's own driveway onto Washington Boulevard, which is expected to back up in the evenings.

• Whittier Boulevard and Frontage Road: already fails today regardless of the new project; the city has its own fix planned.
• The project's own driveway onto Washington Boulevard: projected to fail in the evening once the new building opens.
• Painter Avenue and Whittier Boulevard: already fails today; the city plans to add a third lane.

Even so, PIH isn't required to pay for any traffic improvements. The study found that most of the congestion already existed before this project, and that the new traffic doesn't trigger the legal requirement for a developer to fund fixes. The city says it already has its own road work planned for two of the affected intersections.

PIH is adding a few smaller things that should help the area: a new sidewalk on Putnam Street where there isn't one now, walking paths around all four sides of the building, a secure bike room, two dozen or so short-term bike parking spots near the bus stop on Washington, and a program that pays employees who choose not to drive to work.

A piece of public art is also required near the Washington and Putnam corner, though no design has been picked yet.

Public land, headed to a private owner

Here's a piece of the project that's gotten less attention than the building itself. To put the site together, the city is giving up a stretch of alley running through the property, about 16,900 square feet of land that currently belongs to the public. Once the city signs off, that land becomes part of PIH's private property.

PIH owns everything around that alley already and asked the city to hand it over, saying it would help traffic move better within the medical campus.

That hasn't happened yet. On June 9, the City Council took the first step, scheduling a public hearing for July 14, where council members will decide whether to give up the land. City staff say PIH won't pay anything for it since the alley is already surrounded on every side by a single property owner.

The city still has permanent rights to maintain a sewer line that runs through that strip of land, no matter who ends up owning the ground above it.

Anyone who wants to weigh in can show up to the July 14 hearing at City Hall.

What we don't know

A few questions are still open as we publish this. PIH hasn't said whether any services in the new building are moving over from the hospital or from its other campuses, how many jobs the project will create, or how it will improve how long people wait for a specialist appointment in Whittier.

We'll update this story if that changes.