SEQUIM — The Jamestown S’Klallam tribe will build a 35,000-square-foot clinic to provide health care to tribal members and the larger community at Sequim’s Olympic Medical Cancer Center, Tribal Chairman Ron Allen says.
Groundbreaking is set for Sept. 8 and construction will take more than a year, Allen said, adding that 15 to 19 practitioners, including family physicians, specialists and nurse practitioners, will join the clinic when it opens in late 2007.
The facility, at three times the size of the tribe’s four-year-old clinic on Fifth Avenue in Sequim, will accommodate 17,000 patients, added Bill Riley, the tribe’s health and human services director.
Medicare patients
The Jamestown tribe is embarking on the project to provide patients, including those on Medicaid and Medicare, with “stable, high quality” care, added Allen.
Totem poles will tower over the building, which will have the Coast Salish longhouse design seen on the tribe’s 7 Cedars Casino and Tribal Center in Blyn, but it will be “complementary” to the cancer center structures, Allen said.
The Jamestown tribe has long envisioned the clinic, the chairman added.
Now financing for the $9 million building is in order, including a $500,000 grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, bank loans and other grants.
“Our biggest challenge is to reduce the debt load,” Allen said.
“We’re going to have a capital campaign; we’re going to be fund-raising in a huge way.”
To keep the clinic self-sustaining, he added, the tribe must reach out to the whole North Olympic Peninsula — for funding and for patients.
‘Meaningful partner’
“This shows that the tribe is very much a part of the community,” Allen said.
“We are a meaningful partner,” with the city of Sequim.
“We have a lot on our plate,” he acknowledged.
Later this year, the Jamestown tribe plans to build a “Country Store and Gathering Place,” a gas station and a Clallam County Fire District No. 3 station near the 7 Cedars Casino on U.S. Highway 101 in Blyn about 7 miles east of Sequim.
In 2007 construction will begin on a seven-story resort hotel, also near the casino.
