Oct. 11, 2021

This paid piece is sponsored by TSP.

Businesses and entire communities devote a great deal of time, energy and money to create sustained growth. When it comes though, the pace can be both exhilarating and a bit overwhelming. Pieces that took years to set in place come together seemingly overnight.

For leaders in the Harrisburg area south of Sioux Falls, assessing opportunity while keeping a small-town feel has become a daily must. That priority underscores the decisions made by civic, school district and business partners alike.

No area of town embodies that balancing act like the booming intersection of Willow and Cliff avenues. And no single project brings together all the elements quite like the highly anticipated Sanford Clinic and Lewis Drug retail pharmacy. The 20,000-square-foot building broke ground in mid-March and is on track to open for patient visits in the summer of 2022.

“It’s a pretty exciting time to be in Harrisburg, and this feels like a huge step in the right direction,” Mayor Derick Wenck said. “A lot of people are looking at Sanford’s commitment to come here with a structure this size. It says a lot about where we are now. I think we’re going to see a lot more companies step in behind that.”

What’s your vision for Harrisburg’s future?

Join city leaders and the Harrisburg Economic Development Corporation for upcoming community dialogue sessions.

When: Oct. 12, 14, 20 and 23. Check HarrisburgSDChamber.com for times.

Where: Liberty Elementary School Board Room for the first three sessions and the City Hall conference room for Oct. 23

How: Register online in advance or just stop in!

The familiar Sanford tower is a signal of what’s to come. The clinic and drugstore combo will be Harrisburg’s first full-service health care shop, with providers and support services under the same roof as a pharmacy. But it’s the multifaceted partnership among the TSP-led design team that makes the project a truly transformational one. The health system, Fiegen Construction, the Harrisburg School District and City Hall all are working together to create a meaningful addition to their community — and using the experience as a real-world classroom for students in the high school’s Career & Technical Education initiative.

“To me, this project is the visual representation of all the work and partnership development the district has put into the last few years,” said CTE coordinator Breanne Lynch. “This is the model of when people get out of our own way and just do the thing that’s right for kids.”

The facility

Architects, engineers and interior specialists at TSP Inc. supported Sanford Health’s vision with a fast-track design schedule. The firm’s integrated approach enabled the firm to take the project from a general idea to a bid-ready set of construction documents in nine weeks. While the newest Sanford Clinic adapts the format proven at other locations, the project incorporates a different arrangement of spaces customized for the Harrisburg site and population.

Clinic space will occupy just under 16,000 square feet of the building. It’s enough to include 24 exam rooms and two treatment rooms in an onstage/offstage care delivery model — with room to grow on the site. The clinic’s eight providers will offer appointments and walk-in visits for several primary care specialties: family medicine, pediatrics and obstetrics.

Patients also will get an on-site lab and radiology services, eliminating the need to drive to Sioux Falls for a blood draw or X-ray.

The Lewis component will take up the remaining 4,100 square feet. A canopied drive-up window will enable prescription pickups on the building’s north side.

“It can be challenging to accommodate all these different functions and areas in a way that works just as well for patients as it does for the providers,” said Lucas Lorenzen, a TSP project lead and structural engineer. And as a Harrisburg resident, he looks forward to the convenience of the clinic and pharmacy for his own family.

“We’ve got separate waiting areas for each of the three major specialties, and those are the bump-outs you see along the front,” he said. “There’s so much natural light there, with east-facing windows. We also were able to do a shared entrance, so people can come in a central door for Sanford or Lewis, and they’re directly near the check-in desk. It’s a really great design in terms of patient experience.”

Some aspects of those welcoming interiors will be familiar from other Sanford facilities, and that’s by design.

“We try to make it easy for wayfinding and to replicate some key design elements in all our projects,” said Kris Denevan, the health system’s executive director of facilities and support services.

Whenever space allows, new Sanford Clinic sites also feature an offstage back corridor that’s more efficient for staff. The model contributes to patient privacy.

“Staff enter the exam rooms from a back corridor or the nursing core, and patients come in from the public side of the rooms,” said Eric Kinghorn, Sanford USD Medical Center’s director of planning and construction. “They don’t have to pass in the hallways, and the care team isn’t constantly opening doors into the main hallway where other patients might be.”

The learning opportunity

About a month after the project broke ground, Lorenzen gathered his thoughts for an important presentation to stakeholders. The audience: students and staff from Harrisburg High School’s Home Builders Academy and additional learners enrolled in CTE courses. Lorenzen was there with the Harrisburg city engineer and colleagues from GeoTek and Fiegen for an annual Week of Work event. Members of the clinic design team talked about their career path and then brought students outdoors for a soil-boring demonstration to assess ground composition. After lunch, the group toured the project site.

“Four years ago, we were challenged by the superintendent at the time to change the way we thought about business and industry partners,” said Travis Lape, the school district’s director for innovative programs. “We looked at how we’re providing authentic experiences for students as part of choosing the kind of work they want to do.”

It started with a few small groups of interns placed in Harrisburg and Sioux Falls businesses, including TSP. It has grown exponentially along with the high school’s enrollment, which now is nearly 1,500. Those students have different interests, goals and career support needs. Lape wanted a program that was flexible enough to help a broader range of learners make the right decisions for themselves. The effort took off in earnest when Linda Heerde, the school board’s chair, moved into her role as director of learning and development for Sanford Health. The position enables her to leverage a major employer’s resources to help her hometown district think differently about workforce shortages.

“Some kids know what they want to do. They’re set on a job or a college. Some want to go right to the workforce, and some will do a two-year program and need help picking one that’s targeted for their area,” Lape said. “What we offer can help reinforce someone’s choice about what they think they want to do or help them understand it isn’t necessarily what they thought it would be. That can be a pretty expensive decision if they get well into a college program before they realize something isn’t a good fit.”

This fall, 22 students will be placed in internships. TSP will welcome an engineering intern, while Sanford will host a construction management intern. Another group of 40 to 50 students will take their turn in the spring. No matter the schedule, the expectations are the same: a six-week classroom course to develop soft skills such as resume writing, another six weeks of interviewing and onboarding with companies and a 10-week placement.

“The commitment is 10 hours a week over 10 weeks, for 100 hours of experiential, on-the-job learning,” Lynch said. “About 70 percent of those are paid internships, depending on the employer. Directly related to the Sanford Clinic project, we see the intern there and the intern at TSP really working within those organizations to facilitate site visits for the whole group. Once the building is sealed up, it will be more realistic for us to be there.”

There’s not a lot of a legwork for the business. It usually starts with an email or a phone call, and Lape or Lynch takes it from there.

“We tell businesses, ‘If you’re willing to work with us and take a little bit of a risk, we’re willing to knock down the walls to make it happen,’ ” said Lape.

The community touchstone

As a structural engineer, Lorenzen focuses on what it takes to build those supports. He joined TSP six years ago, and he remembers being told during his first week that relationships would make the difference.

“I was told to get involved in my community and figure out what it needs,” said Lorenzen, who took the message to heart. In addition to leadership roles at his church, he serves on the Harrisburg Economic Development Corporation. He’s invested in the town’s growth, the quality of his children’s education there and his own profession. The Sanford Clinic project unites all three.

“I think this is a natural progression of what we do here at TSP,” he said. “We aren’t just writing work proposals for everything that comes across our desk. We want to know the people behind these projects. If we know them and they know us, it makes everyone’s outcome more fulfilling.”

Sanford’s Kinghorn is one of them. A little more than a dozen years ago, he moved to a Harrisburg neighborhood just north of the new clinic site. There was no grocery store in town then, nor a hardware shop.

“Sanford always looks to be a pillar of the community wherever we are, contributing there and providing needed services,” he said. “On the personal side, it’s fun to be a part of everything that’s going on here. It’s not only Sanford, but other development too.”

Mayor Wenck and partners from the Harrisburg Economic Development Corporation have plans for even more. The two groups are hosting a series of community dialogue sessions for people to provide input on what they want Harrisburg to look like decades into the future.

“This is about quality of life and continuing to move forward,” Wenck said.

The public meetings will run at least through October. The economic development group will compile the results as part of its ongoing strategic-planning process and communicate that vision to the community.

“It has to be a comprehensive effort. We want to verify what we’ve heard in some of the earlier sessions and give people time to let us know what they want,” said Adrienne McKeown, president of the group. “We’ve got grocery stores and gas stations,; dentists, an eye doctor, a chiropractor and a small Avera Health presence that’s pretty maxed out. We’d like to build up professional services. We need attorneys and accountants and others who can come here.

“Then, we have to get into the details,” McKeown added. “If we want this 20, 30, 40 years from now, what do we have to do today to make it happen? For example, we know that building out industrial park space creates jobs, which has a trickle-down effect for other businesses. More jobs means more discretionary income in town and maybe a desire for more activities or sit-down family restaurants.”

As a design professional, TSP’s Lorenzen sees the common points that connect it all. The new Sanford Clinic and Lewis Drug intersection ultimately will become a roundabout at Cliff and Willow avenues — capping years of traffic studies to construct the city-approved street project.

“We’re all doing related things in different lanes. But if we’re all going in the same direction, that collaboration is mutually beneficial in so many ways,” Lorenzen said. “People who are passionate about what they do and really present to the task at hand make this all worthwhile.”