GUILDERLAND — The Guilderland Planning Board this week was presented with what could be “the largest medical office building in the town of Guilderland.”

On Wednesday, the board began its site-plan review of New York Oncology Hematology’s proposed Western Avenue regional cancer center. 

The $55 million facility would: 

— Be a 120,000-square foot, three-story building located on 8.36 acres in Guilderland’s Transit-Oriented Development district, near Crossgates Mall;

— Cover 75 percent of the lot; 

— Require 760 parking spaces; however, only 600 are proposed, including 25 for handicapped access, meaning a variance is needed; 

— Have a construction timeline of 15 months; and 

— Have hours of operation from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, with potential morning hours on Saturday, and have a staff of 275, of which 35 would be physicians. 

Town Planner Ken Kovalchik explained that the proposed site is associated with two other projects — the Apex at Crossgates apartment development and the much-litigated Costco Wholesale — whose environmental impact received  “an extensive” review in 2020. 

He said the area was also analyzed as part of the town’s 2016 Westmere Corridor study, of which one of the primary recommendations was to create a Transit-Oriented Development district (TOD). 

The district itself, Kovalchik said, essentially encompasses the area around Crossgates Mall Road out to Western Avenue and Rapp Road. One of the reasons for the TOD’s adoption is the creation of the Capital District Transit Authority’s purple bus line, which is now in operation.

Business explanation

Chairman Stephen Feeney began by inquiring about the proposed development’s size, noting the 120,000-square-foot building was 20,000 square feet larger than what was initially envisioned. The additional square footage meant the project would need another 140 parking spaces.

“Maybe you could explain exactly what’s going on here as far as the business,” Feeney said.

Richard Rosen, vice president and partner at Columbia Development, said New York Oncology Hematology is the largest outpatient cancer provider in the Capital Region. “And they actually even draw patients from Massachusetts and Vermont,” he said. “So they are envisioning a new regional cancer center.”

Rosen said Columbia/NYOH found the site so appealing because of its location. “The highway system that’s already existing out at the Crossgates Mall Road site is second to none in the Capital District,” he said.

NYOH is currently located on Patroon Creek Boulevard in Albany, spread across several floors, Rosen said, which doesn’t allow for proper patient flow.

“So there’s duplications of reception and waiting areas, because they’re staggered throughout the building,” he said, but if all that space were consolidated, “they could have a more efficient layout and a better patient experience.”

NYOH also has a clinic at Albany Medical Center, in the old part of the hospital. He said, “There’s no specific reason for it to be there.”

Rosen added, “Obviously, there’s some advantages to being on a hospital campus. But there are also some disadvantages,” he said, noting that Albany Med and NYOH have “been in discussions” about consolidating into one “large regional cancer center run by NYOH.”

Addressing Feeney’s question about size, Rosen said that the initial design was for 100,000 square feet.

But considering NYOH’s need for a facility that could adapt to future growth, “My client said to me, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m doing this for the future, I’m doing this for the next 20 years. I want to be able to move into this building, knowing that, in five years, if I add a program, or a program grows, or the demographics of the area changes, we can adjust accordingly with this facility,’” Rosen recalled.

The facility, among other things, will house nearly 60 stations for chemotherapy, specialty nutritionists, and a dedicated Women’s Health Center.

The goal, Rosen said, is to address the impact of cancer on many lives, particularly in the Albany area. When someone is diagnosed, he said, one of the first things they often hear is they should head to either New York or Boston for treatment.

Yes, the two cities offer excellent cancer facilities, he said, but a trip south or east sometimes isn’t necessary. Patients actually tend to fare better when they can receive treatment close to home, Rosen said, allowing them to sleep in their own beds and maintain their daily routines.

“So that’s why we’re going to try to build this regional cancer center,” he said. 

Asked about having 600 parking spots instead of the code-required 780, Rosen said Columbia’s previous medical office development has shown the additional parking is often unnecessary. 

“Everybody wants to park around the building and all the spots out here, the 100 spots extra that we built, no one ever uses,” he said. “And with trying to be sensitive to impervious surface and stormwater management — we’ve gone through and looked at our portfolio in the Capital District and the Hudson Valley, and we know that five spots per 1,000 [square feet of space] works for a medical office building this size.”

He said Columbia had received similar variances before. 

Asked about how the facility would use the new CDTA bus line, Rosen said some employees might use it, but most patients who come to the center are “brought by a loved one or a person in their life,” or they can “call NYOH and say, ‘I don’t feel well. I don’t want to drive,’ [and] they will arrange to have transportation made for you.”

The property is currently owned by an LLC affiliated with Pyramid Management Group, the parent company of Crossgates Mall, but Columbia is under contract to purchase the site, should it receive approval for the facility.

Residents’ concerns

When the meeting was opened up to the public for comment, Guilderland resident Karen White asked if NYOH planned to operate the Patroon Creek facility as well as the new center in Guilderland, and was told the two would be consolidated. 

She then wondered how the project would impact the environment. 

“It just seems like we’re never going to get to our climate [goals] by 2030 if we continue to let people basically develop sites that are at least partially green at this point,” she said, and asked if NYOH had considered other development opportunities or just refurbishing its current facility

Rosen responded that NYOH’s Patroon Creek facility couldn’t be rehabbed because the cancer center isn’t the only tenant in the building.  “If you can think about it like a puzzle piece, they own a piece over here and then a piece over here, and then there’s a tenant in between them,” he said. “And they can’t kick that tenant [out] or move that tenant out of the way. This is kind of like a blank slate for them to plan for the future.”

Robyn Gray, who chairs the citizens’ group the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth, said she was concerned that the area around the proposed development was “zoned as a TOD, and one of the things that I thought required by law with a TOD was to reduce traffic and to promote pedestrian, walkability, pedestrian traffic.”

Gray said, “And we’re not seeing that with the addition of a Costco … And now this particular project, with 600 or 500 [spots], or however many parking spaces there are. So I don't know how we get around that. I thought that’s what our town code said about TODs.”

Later in the meeting, Kovalchik effectively said the proposed facility is one of the uses the town envisioned when it came up with the TOD.