Pulaski Memorial Hospital will get almost $800,000 from the county’s Cumulative Building Fund for its new MRI building. The funding request was approved by the county council Monday, after the county commissioners approved it last week. It calls for the money to be paid in 17 installments between now and 2027.
It’s part of the hospital’s effort to install a fixed MRI machine. Patients previously had to use a mobile MRI that visited the hospital two or three times a week.
Pulaski Memorial Hospital Director of Business Development Gregg Malott explained that the Cumulative Building Fund is designated specifically for hospital projects. Recently, it’s been used for a chiller replacement and the construction of a new maintenance building.
Malott said the chiller project was paid off last year and the maintenance building soon will be, freeing up funds for the new project. He said that’s part of the reason that the hospital decided to wait until after the building was complete before asking for the money. “We felt that the hospital had to put some stake in the game, too, to be able to not just only do an MRI project if we were going to be granted the distributions,” he told council members. “We felt it was important enough to be able to just go ahead and move forward with it, and hope that the CB funds were approved.”
Malott explained the Cumulative Building funds will only be used for the cost of the building. The hospital secured financing for the MRI machine itself, which cost nearly $1.7 million. He said the new structure had to be built to certain specifications, to minimize vibrations and magnetic interference with the machine.
