SEARHC plans to build an 8,000-square-foot medical services building to consolidate dental and behavioral health services into a single campus, anchored by the hospital.

“We’re calling it the Wrangell Campus,” Ryan Matej, the Sitka-based chief administrative officer for the health care provider, said in a phone interview on Friday, May 1.

SEARHC has been looking at how to consolidate its multiple service locations in town, he said.

The dental clinic currently operates out of a SEARHC-owned building at Front and McKinnon streets, about a mile from the hospital. Behavioral health services are housed in a SEARHC-owned building at Church and St. Michaels streets.

Matej said no decision has been made on the future use of the two buildings after they are vacated.

“It’s really in the infant beginning stages,” he said of the construction project next to the hospital. “We’ve broken some ground,” with no specific timeline for construction.

Contractors will work over the next several months on site prep, preparing for a foundation and roughing in utilities, he said, but no actual construction.

At about 8,000 square feet, the medical services building will be about one-fifth the size of the Wrangell Medical Center, which SEARHC opened in 2021 with a hospital and long-term care unit.

The next phase, Matej said, will be the design work.

The health care provider has not yet applied for a building permit.

The new building also will include space for one or two optometry bays, he said, providing a dedicated area for visiting optometrists who currently work out of the hospital building.

SEARHC last month dedicated a new $300 million hospital and medical center on its Sitka campus. Charles Clement, who has served as president the past 14 years, talked about plans for Wrangell in a newspaper interview after the opening. “We have multiple facilities all over town, and we have enough land there to bring it all into a medical campus.”

SEARHC is the largest employer in Wrangell, with about 170 full-time equivalent employees and direct contractors in 2025, according to a Rain Coast Data economic report for the borough last fall.

The report said the health care payroll in Wrangell in 2024, at $15.2 million, exceeded all other industries in town.

SEARHC is the largest health care provider in Southeast, with facilities in 15 communities and traveling services for 13 more towns across the region.

This story was originally published by the Wrangell Sentinel.