Columbia Memorial Hospital is set to receive $6 million from the state of Oregon for a major expansion project at its Astoria campus.
Oregon’s House and Senate passed House Bill 5006 on Friday. The bill included the budget allocation for the hospital as well as $700,000 for the Columbia River Maritime Museum’s Mariners Hall Exhibition and Education building, also currently under construction in Astoria.
The money Columbia Memorial will receive will help pay for features at a new building intended to make the campus more resilient in the face of natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. This includes the creation of a tsunami-safe refuge space, additional storage for food and other supplies to support refugees and an evacuation staircase.
“I was ecstatic,” said Erik Thorsen, CEO of Columbia Memorial, describing when he heard the news. “This was a really big team effort to get this funding across the finish line.”
The expansion project and the hospital’s request for state funding gained strong support from local and regional lawmakers and from former state senator Betsy Johnson. Hospital and community leaders argued that the project fit with Oregon’s overall goals when it comes to emergency preparedness and disaster resilience.
Still, success was not certain. State. Rep. Cyrus Javadi, a champion of the project whose District 32 includes Clatsop County, told KMUN earlier this year that $6 million was a lot to ask for, especially in a tight budget year.
Originally, the $6 million was meant to be a match for a $14 million grant Columbia Memorial had been awarded through a Federal Emergency Management Agency resiliency program. The Trump administration terminated that program this spring, leaving hospital leaders uncertain about how state lawmakers would receive their request.
Javadi said Columbia Memorial and its supporters were upfront about the situation and the project continued to gain support and interest. Javadi said some of the factors that made it an attractive project for the state to fund were the resiliency components, a strong local team leading the project and the fact that the hospital was only asking the state to cover a fraction of the cost in what is expected to be a $225 to $250 million project.
Thorsen said that while the state funding brings the hospital closer to full funding, they are looking to close the gap left when the federal grant was terminated. He is still pushing to have that funding restored.
“But my optimism about that is not as high as it was with the state ask,” he said.
Columbia Memorial will look at other ways to fill the funding gap, perhaps through grants for flood hazard management or other types of mitigation, said Mark Kujala, executive director of the Columbia Memorial Hospital Foundation, which leads fundraising efforts for the hospital.
“We just have to kind of keep our options open and we’ve got two and a half years really to do this, until the end of the project,” he said.
Kujala is also a Clatsop County commissioner and said the hospital expansion project fits with the goals of the county’s emergency management planning.
At this point, funding is not a big concern, Thorsen agreed. And the project is on schedule with phase 1 work set to be completed in 2027.
A more looming issue are the Medicaid cuts outlined in President Trump’s domestic agenda bill. Republicans in the Senate narrowly passed the bill on Tuesday. It now goes to the House.
“The uncertainty with Medicaid cuts from the ‘big, beautiful bill’ are probably the next area that we’re concerned with and what the impact of that will be on the operations of the organization,” Thorsen said. “I don’t believe it will have any impact on the project.”
In Clatsop County, 34% of the population is enrolled with Medicaid, including nearly 5,000 children, according to information provided by the Oregon Health Authority.