Officials break ground for new Bullhook Clinic

A crowd gathered for the official ceremony Friday to mark the official start of the next major medical development in Havre — the new clinic for the Bullhook Community Health Center.

“This is seven years of dreaming and two years of focused planning to really get to where we are today,” Todd Hanson, chair of Bullhook’s board of directors, said after the first shovels of dirt were turned with gold-plated shovels.

Close to 60 people attended the ceremony, with Hanson joined by a crowd of officials to shovel the first dirt on the project.

Work already had begun on tearing down the two buildings on the property, the Brandon Building and the building that formerly housed Heberly Engineering, to make way for the new construction. An artist’s rendition of the new clinic is included on the sign at the site, across from the Havre Police Department, Fire Department and City Hall at 4th Street at 5th Avenue.

The new clinic is expected to be open by next spring or early summer, consolidating all of Bullhook’s medical services into one location. The medical and counseling services now are provided at a space leased from Northern Montana Health Care just east of Northern Montana Hospital, with the dental services provided in a location in the Atrium Mall.

The intent is to provide a single location for all services, in a patient-centered medical home model. In that model, health care providers give coordinated care in all aspects of the patient’s health, dealing with the patient as a “whole person” rather than having separate health care providers making unrelated diagnoses and providing unrelated treatments.

Hanson talked about the funding for the project, which includes a $4,957,921 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Montana Community Development Corp. in Missoula was instrumental in helping the project receive about $1.2 million in new market tax credits, providing owner-equity funding for the project, with U.S. Bank the investor in that, he said.

Bear Paw Development Corp. also helped, providing a Brownsfield abatement loan to pay for work cleaning up the site, and the Great Falls Development Authority provided a bridge loan, Hanson said.

“As you can see, we’ve got a lot of partners at the table,” he said.

He also welcomed officials from CTA Architects and Engineers and Guy Tobacco Construction Corp., the architects and lead contractors for the project, to the ceremony.

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who was one of the shovelers at the ceremony, said the clinic will take a lot of money — by his estimate the project is now at about $6.5 million — but that is money well-spent, he said.

“The bottom line is, once you get done you’re going to have a beautiful piece of infrastructure that’s going to serve the people of this area in a way that you can be proud of,” he said.

He also thanked Bullhook CEO Cindy Smith for her work on the project.

“Nobody has worked harder than Cindy Smith, and I think we need to give her a round of applause,” Tester said. “Without her, this never would have happened.”

Smith, when introducing Tester, thanked the medical providers and staff members of the health center, for their work providing health services to the community and helping bring the new clinic to reality.

“This is really exciting,” Smith said.

Smith, while director of nursing at the Hill County Health Department, spearheaded the creation of the community health center. It originally was part of the county health department, until nonprofit status and a federal community health center grant could be secured to open the clinic as a separate entity.

That led to the move to the medical center by the hospital, at the same time that work was ongoing to start dental services, which ended up in the Atrium.

Tester said the project means more than building a community and providing jobs.

“It’s about access to health care — it’s so critically important — access to health care thats affordable,” he said. “Once this building gets up, I think it’s going to be another pearl in this community, really meet the needs of this community and improve quality of life and improve health, which is really the bottom line.”