MARQUETTE – Preliminary site plans and the Planned Unit Development for UP Health System-Marquette’s new hospital were approved Tuesday by the Marquette Planning Commission.

The approval, however, came with a couple conditions: Investigating the best helicopter flight path and using materials to maximize wildlife safety and energy efficiency when possible.

According to the plan, the total size of the project property is 39.95 acres, to be located at 850 W. Baraga Ave., and includes a piece of privately-owned property along Washington Street proposed as an ambulance garage.

Though hospital officials said the property hasn’t been purchased and wasn’t part of the site plan presented, an access drive from Washington Street to the hospital complex was shown on the drawings.

Commissioner Paul Schloegel said he was concerned with traffic flow related to that proposed drive.

“That’s going to bring more traffic to the Washington Street portion, because people aren’t going to want to go out on the highway or that’s where they live on that side of town,” Schloegel said.

Jeffrey Heinze, principal landscape architect with Littlejohn Engineering Associates, said the hospital would conduct a traffic study for the access point.

“There’s a study being done to the access on (U.S.) 41 and all those things that actually the city is spurring, and then we’ll look at the access to Washington Street and make sure that works,” Heinze said.

Improvements on U.S. 41 could include a roundabout near the hospital complex and some citizens at the meeting questioned whether their homes would be demolished to make room for the development.

“To my knowledge the first I had heard about any houses being torn down as part of this development was (Tuesday) and there are no houses on our 37 acres that are going to be torn down,” said Greg Zarnick, senior construction project manager for Duke LifePoint, UP Health System-Marquette’s parent company.

Dennis Stachewicz, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Community Development, said the city has contracted DLZ Michigan Inc. to study the U.S. 41 traffic patterns and propose possible design options.

“That roundabout shown there is really for illustrative purposes,” Stachewicz said. “It really may or may not be that.”

Stachewicz said the city will go through a planning process with the Michigan Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration, and a decision on a preferred option could take up to a year.

“With regards to the eminent domain and the taking of houses, we have not come up with any preliminary designs at this point that would require the acquisition of any private property, and for the purposes of this development itself they’re dealing with 37 acres of vacant property,” Stachewicz said.

The hospital’s helipad will be placed off the northeast corner of the 535,000-square-foot hospital building. The proposed flight path would allow helicopters to approach the pad from the northeast over commercially zoned property along Washington Street and depart the hospital property toward the west.

“It could be rather loud from the perspective of people in Snowberry Heights,” Commissioner Robert Kulisheck said. “That’s a relatively tall building and the helicopter is going to be coming in at eye level for some of the places there.”

Kulisheck asked that an alternate flight path be considered allowing northbound choppers to travel out above Lake Superior until reaching the rock cut near Shiras Hills where helicopters would then follow the U.S. 41 corridor and bypass until reaching the hospital complex.

“We would look at alternatives for the helipad flight path, one thing I’d ask all of us to be conscious of as we do that, though, is that considering what it’s used for, moments count,” Zarnick said, warning of potential tragedies that could result if the distance and time of getting a patient to the hospital are increased.

Northern Michigan University biology professor Alec Lindsay, a member of the conservation organization Michigan Audubon, said he would like to see the hospital be designed in a way to limit potential bird fatalities following collisions with the building’s exterior, which is designed with alternating patterns of glass and concrete.

“In the United States alone, scientists estimate that window strikes kill 300 million to 1 billion birds every year,” Lindsay said.

He said other cities have followed well established guidelines to designing bird-friendly buildings, which include etched and fritted glass.

“According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, birdwatching is the second fastest growing leisure activity in North America,” Lindsay said. “An estimated 63 million Americans participated in wildlife watching ecotourism each year. In the process, they spend close to $30 billion annually, a major portion of it related to birds.”

Greg Gore, principal with the hospital’s contracted design firm Gresham, Smith and Partners, said the building is designed with a glass that is nearly transparent.

“The glass that we used has an 11 percent reflectivity, which is almost clear,” he said. “The lowest glazing that you can get, the reflectivity on the glazing is 9 percent, so we’re using almost a clear glass. We are not using a mirror glass, which is upwards of 40 percent.”

Gore added that Duke LifePoint recently requested a study be commissioned to determine the overall reflectivity of the building.

Ryan Jarvi can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242.