Saginaw ‘medical diamond’ plan takes shape

An ambitious vision to turn space along the Saginaw River into Michigan’s third bioscience hub is starting to take shape.

The Saginaw “Medical Diamond” project will include a new Saginaw County Health Department building, several Saginaw Valley State University graduate programs and Central Michigan University’s medical school, which is relocating to the city, as well as a behavioral health center and a riverside park.

The projects will fill in an area around the Covenant HealthCare and MyMichigan Health hospitals, which are situated on opposite sides of the river.

During a Saginaw City Council Strategic Planning meeting in late January that invited stakeholders to update the community on their parts of the project, Saginaw Mayor Brenda Moore described the project as a long-term investment into the city’s future.

“I need everybody going to a dreaming mode,” Moore said. “I need you to imagine what it’s going to look like. At the end of the day, Saginaw is being rebirthed. And in order for us to be rebirthed, it’s going to take time.”

Moore strongly encouraged residents to attend future meetings and open houses to share their feedback. Videos of all the presentations from the meeting can be found at https://www.saginaw-mi.com/269/Saginaw-Strategic-Planning.

Among attendees at the meeting, sentiment about the project was generally excited and supportive. 

“It’s a lot of good things happening in the city,” said resident Saleem Mannan. “Saginaw is so negative. …We’re so overwhelmed by the negativity that we don’t see the good. But these people outside coming in, they recognize, ‘Hey, man, it’s good here. It’s the city, it’s the infrastructure, it’s a lot of things, so we want to locate here.’ So it’s coming back. Saginaw is going to rise.”

Saginaw resident Beverly Austin said healthcare facilities are “sparse” and spread out around the area, so she is excited to see a change.

“I think having buildings closer together and everything — we can get around better,” Austin said.

Here is a rundown of where all the moving parts stand, according to presentations at the meeting.

The Saginaw County Health Department will move out of its aging building at 1600 N. Michigan Ave. in Saginaw and into a future facility near an old Rite Aid which Covenant HealthCare plans to convert into a primary and urgent care facility. 

Covenant is also purchasing and developing the land around the former Rite Aid, and the future Health Department building will be located on this land.

Christina Harrington, chief health officer of the Saginaw County Health Department, said the department hopes its participation in the project will influence how new physicians see their role in public health.

“Every physician, no matter where they practice, no matter what type of medicine they practice, has a role within the public health system,” Harrington said. “They are a part of it, and I’m not sure if they always understand that. You think, ‘I’ll treat a patient, move on. Treat the next patient, move on.’ But this is really about a system involved in caring about people and populations.”

CMU is moving its newly renamed Covenant HealthCare College of Medicine from Mount Pleasant to Saginaw with the help of $40 million each from partners MyMichigan Health and Covenant Healthcare.

Currently, CMU medical students spend their first two years at CMU’s campus in Mount Pleasant, and most spend the latter half of their program time in Saginaw. This move will put all medical students in one place. 

MyMichigan donated land adjacent to its Saginaw campus at 800 South Washington Avenue, one block away from where the medical school had originally planned to relocate. Great Lakes Bay Health Center will build a behavioral health center on the land that CMU originally had in mind for the development. 

“This great opportunity that we had most recently with MyMichigan, where they were able to match the Covenant commitment and also provide land plus 200 parking spaces for us right on their campus, really was the game changer that created enough momentum for us to take that project forward,” said Pete Kramer of Kramer Management Group, who is working with CMU on the transition.

CMU plans to combine two parcels of MyMichigan property, totaling just over two acres, into a single site which will be home to an 80,000-plus-square-foot facility. CMU is still finalizing the land transactions with MyMichigan and expects to secure the land and parking spaces by this summer.

Renderings and architectural plans for the medical school building have not yet been made public.

CMU is not planning to build student housing for the new medical school.

SVSU, meanwhile, is planning a 50,000-square-foot facility that will host 400 graduate students in health-related fields like social work, nursing and occupational therapy.

“A defining strength of SVSU is interprofessional collaboration,” said Marcia Ditmyer, dean of SVSU’s College of Health & Human Services. “This center builds work (and) brings learners together across disciplines to train the way we practice, working in teams to address complex physical and behavioral health needs.”

The facility will potentially include a Simulation Adaptive Tiny House which would help train students from a variety of disciplines in aging in place, care transitions, behavioral health and chronic disease management, Ditmyer said.

The facility would cost an estimated $30 million and does not yet have a location, although the university is looking at real estate along the river, according to Noel Hornbacher, vice president for administration and business affairs at SVSU.

Groundbreaking will happen in 2028 at the earliest, according to Hornbacher.

Great Lakes Bay Health Centers is planning to create a Behavioral Health Center of Excellence. GLBHC, which aims to provide quality healthcare regardless of ability to pay, has 11 Saginaw locations and eight mobile units in the city. 

The behavioral health center will have a 15,000-square-foot footprint and be part of a facility with areas dedicated to multiple areas of health, according to COO Jamie Furbish.

The location will be a “one stop shop” for care, Furbish said. That includes 14,000 square feet dedicated to primary care; 2,000 for pharmacy; 1,000 for lab services; 4,000 for specialty care and 4,500 for physical and occupational therapy.

The center will partner with CMU and SVSU for the physical/occupational therapy and the specialty care, respectively.

In total, the facility will have a 45,000-square-foot footprint, Furbish said. It will be located at the 400 and 500 blocks of S. Washington Ave., where CMU had originally planned to relocate its medical school.

The spot is only about a half block north of the location GLBHC had originally considered for the facility, but the location means the project will be eligible for the federal New Market Tax Credit Program, which Furbish said could reduce the project’s cost by several million dollars.

“Us being able to move north really helps us out in being able to secure the funding to grow this to the size that we think is appropriate,” he said.

Groundbreaking is expected to happen in the fall of 2026.