The Maryville City Council approved a rezoning request May 5 by Prisma Health — the corporate owner of Blount Memorial Hospital — that would allow the company to build an outpatient facility on Golf View Drive. The land affected, totaling about 16 acres, sits alongside the Royal Oaks subdivision in Maryville.
If completed, the facility would expand Prisma’s local reach and boost the county’s health infrastructure.
The council approved the rezoning on second reading May 5, officially changing the property’s zoning from residential to business and transportation.
Bruce Martin, local director of facilities for Prisma, said the company will begin capital budgeting for the project in October and likely won’t begin any in-depth planning until next year.
“We do not have plans to sell this if we don’t build up,” Martin said. “We will eventually build on it, if somehow this project imploded — which I can’t imagine happening.”
Prisma representatives described the project as a phased outpatient medical development rather than a hospital-scale campus. The first phase will include medical offices and imaging equipment, pending state approval for the imaging equipment. The second phase — an outpatient surgery center — could be years away.
A Prisma representative said the company does not yet have specific employee number estimates for the project, but Martin told countil members in April that he expects the new facility will employ over 100 people.
In a public hearing during the April council meeting — in which officials passed the rezoning’s first reading — residents in the nearby subdivision voiced concerns about noise, traffic and impacts to their views.
Prisma representatives expressed a desire to work with neighbors — an offer nearby residents said they aimed to take up when the project reaches the site planning process.
City officials pitched the vote as the less invasive of two options. The 16-acre property could accommodate 80 to 100 homes if left zoned residential.
“If you get 100 new homes back there, their rear property lines will be your rear property lines,” Council Member Fred Metz said. “You’re going to be cheek and jowl when they’re together.”
With the medical facility, council members said they could preserve a setback that will put some distance between the campus and nearby homes.
