Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

The Phoenix City Council has agreed to enter into letters of understanding with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona to develop a downtown medical campus.

City officials will work with the two state colleges in site selection for a comprehensive educational campus.

"We're collaborating in a way we've never done before," said Jacqueline Chadwick, M.D., associate vice president of University of Arizona Health Sciences Center's Phoenix campus.

"We've talked with the city of Phoenix," she said. "They're very interested in helping us any way they can to develop this expanded presence. The mayor has made it a point that he wants to have an enhanced educational presence in downtown Phoenix, where we're potentially looking. We don't have any more specific planning at this point."

Initially, UA may take some vacant space at ASU's downtown Phoenix campus at Seventh and Van Buren streets. ASU bought that building earlier this year.

"We would use that as a transition area to hopefully have a full campus somewhere in the downtown area within the next six to 10 years," she said.

University and city officials hint that the area surrounding ASU's building, formerly known as the Mercado, could be the perfect site. It's near several teaching hospitals, including Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center, St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center and Maricopa Medical Center.

Rather than building their own hospital, university officials want to team with existing teaching hospitals.
"It's a huge economic development and technology transfer piece for the city," Chadwick said. "We have to realize that we are behind the curve in bringing that kind of economic development to this state. This lends the city and the state the opportunity to develop in this full new arena that is really going to be the economy of the 21st century."

An educational component has been a missing piece of economic development in downtown Phoenix, said councilman Greg Stanton, who is chairman of the Phoenix City Council Family and Education Subcommittee. The subcommittee voted unanimously last month to recommend that the city council approve entering into letters of understanding with UA and ASU.

"We've all read the economic reports where the future economic growth is going to be," he said. "It's in the medical and knowledge fields. Phoenix needs to be a part of that. If we're going to be part of the future economic strength of this whole country, we need to have biomedical and other health sciences be real strong for our state universities. The city of Phoenix views this as the perfect marriage of the universities."

Gary Krahenbuhl, senior vice president of ASU, pointed out that Phoenix is one of the largest cities in the nation without a medical school.

"People have said that Phoenix will never be the city it can be and ASU will never be the university that it could be until there is a health sciences center that belongs to metropolitan Phoenix," he said.