Saratoga Hospital gets $3M for aging center on Myrtle Street

Saratoga Hospital has received a $3 million gift from the Robert and Lisa Moser Family Foundation toward a new center for older adults on Myrtle Street in Saratoga Springs, the hospital announced at a news conference on Tuesday, Sept. 29. The building will be called the Moser Center for Successful Aging and Wellness, Saratoga TODAY reported.

The hospital also launched a $22 million capital campaign, with close to $9 million raised so far, to pay for the center and a new parking garage across the street from the emergency room entrance, according to Saratoga TODAY.

The project at a glance

Here are the main numbers and dates the hospital has released.

• Location: 59A Myrtle Street, near the main hospital campus at 211 Church Street.
• Gift: $3 million from the Robert and Lisa Moser Family Foundation.
• Campaign: $22 million in all, with close to $9 million raised, which leaves roughly $13 million to go.
• Garage: three levels and 391 parking spaces, directly across from the emergency room entrance.
• Timing: construction of the garage is expected to start sometime between December 2026 and December 2027, with the center to follow.

What the center would hold

The center would bring practices and services now spread around the city into one building, according to Saratoga TODAY. These are the services the hospital listed.

• Primary care, along with specialties such as cardiology.
• Rehabilitation and memory care.
• Nutrition and wellness programs.
• Behavioral health and support for caregivers.
• Community partnerships.

Jill VanKuren, the hospital’s president and chief executive, described the center as a long-held goal, a place where older adults and their families can get coordinated care that helps them stay “healthy, active and independent,” according to Saratoga TODAY.

The hospital has also made a financial case. On a city website that answers questions about the project, the hospital said it pays about $750,000 in rent for the specialty practices that would move into the new center, and that bringing them together would cut rent and utility costs and improve coordination with the hospital, Saratoga TODAY reported. Practices would move as their current leases run out.

The zoning step

Building the garage and the center requires a change to the hospital’s Professional Planned Unit Development, the special zoning that governs the campus. The change would add parcels on Myrtle Street to the planned unit development and allow the new buildings, according to Saratoga TODAY.

The next public step comes Wednesday, Oct. 7. The city’s Design Review Board is scheduled to consider deferring lead agency status for the environmental review of a map and text amendment to the hospital’s planned unit development to the City Council, according to the board’s agenda. The agenda lists the property as 31 and 35 Myrtle Street and places the item among the board’s possible consent agenda items, which can be approved without discussion unless someone asks to pull one for a closer look.

How the plan has changed

The hospital, part of the Albany Med Health System, has been working toward a center for older adults for several years. In planning documents filed in 2024, it said the need for more medical offices on its campus had been pressing for a decade, and that the building would give patients specialty care focused on an aging population, according to the Gazette. The filing said the building could house primary care doctors, specialists, care coordinators, social workers, pharmacists and dietitians. That year, it proposed a 60,000-square-foot medical building on the west side of Myrtle Street, replacing a 10,200-square-foot medical building, with 250 parking spaces in a surface lot and two above-ground decks, The Daily Gazette reported at the time. That version was to start in 2025 and be finished in 2028, so the timeline has slipped. The City Council, acting as lead agency, issued a negative declaration for that version, finding no significant adverse environmental impact, according to a Dec. 24, 2024, notice from the state Department of Environmental Conservation. That notice described a building of up to 60,000 square feet and 50 feet tall on the west side of Myrtle Street.

Neighbors raised questions then. A nearby resident, Alice Smith, told the Gazette in 2024 that neighbors were not opposed to the hospital building on its campus but wanted answers about how many doctors and parking spaces the building would bring. She had been among neighbors who sued the city in 2020 over a zoning change for a proposed 80,000-square-foot hospital building about a block away, the paper reported.

The current plan puts more of the parking in a single structure. The garage described this week has 391 spaces, compared with the 250 spaces in surface parking and decks described in the 2024 proposal.

What happens next

Several steps remain before anything is built. These are the ones to watch.

• Oct. 7: the Design Review Board considers deferring lead agency status for the environmental review to the City Council.
• The City Council’s environmental review and its vote on the planned unit development change.
• The start of garage construction, expected between December 2026 and December 2027.
• The rest of the $22 million campaign, with roughly $13 million still to raise.

Our read: consolidating senior care in one building near the hospital makes practical sense for patients who now bounce between offices, and the rent savings give the hospital a business reason to move. The garage is likely to draw the most attention from neighbors on Myrtle and Church streets, as parking did in 2024.

The gift follows other recent news from Saratoga Hospital, where an Albany Med surgeon joined an operation remotely using the da Vinci 5 surgical robot, as we reported in our Sept. 28 story.

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