Video – Photo Gallery – King Street Medical Centre Offers Many Benefits
Businessman Max Klaczkowski is very proud of the medical-arts building he owns at 316 King St. E. in Cobourg, and would be even prouder of the health benefits it could offer the community if it held all the kind of tenants it once did.
Located across the street from Cobourg Collegiate Institute, its construction was completed in 1999. It soon held health practitioners of all kinds, from optometrists to heart specialists, as well as a ground-floor retail pharmacy, cafe and blood lab – all with ample on-site parking.
In short, Klaczkowski said, the kind of services that become more in demand as the local population not only grows, but grows older. Canada’s population has grown from 25-million in 2002 to about 40-million today, he pointed out. And 55% of Cobourg’s population is seniors, “and growing.”
Klaczkowski purchased the building in May 2002, and eventually decided to turn it into an addiction-and-rehabilitation centre. To that end, he stopped renewing the leases of all the building’s tenants, and the building gradually emptied.
His project was approved by the Town of Cobourg, and they were ready to issue the permit in 2019. But revisions were necessary and differences were never resolved. At one point, the fee was doubled. In the end, his vision of specialized addiction care never materialized – though that same kind of facility later opened at the former Woodlawn Terrace Inn restaurant.
As their consultant with Meridian Planning told council, they were in contravention of human rights in preventing people who needed this extremely important therapy.
Meanwhile, the medical suites now sit empty, while some of their former tenants now offer services in buildings that are not quite as shipshape or – in the case of the blood lab, for example – offer painfully inadequate parking facilities.
The building at 316 King St. E. has spacious suites on three floors and in the basement, and the entire property has been kept (for the most part) in user-ready condition. There have even been expressions of interest from potential practitioners, but one very real roadblock is that the building is completely empty.
It’s a real dilemma, Klaczkowski said. No one, it seems, wants to set up practice in an empty building, but no one is renting those empty units so that the building won’t be empty.
“The patients deserve much better – professional safe space where they can have allied services in the same building,” he said.
And if out-of-town specialists could set up satellite offices there, he continued, it would save people travelling to Oshawa or Toronto.
Offering some statistics, Klaczkowski said there is 40,000 sq. ft. of space and more than 30 examining rooms on offer, “very well maintained and comfortable to operate in. It has an elevator, handicapped access – it’s the most opportune spot for health care, next to the hospital, even though it’s been closed over six years.”
Showing off its potential, he points out where the pharmacy and the cafe (with a patio porch) once operated on the ground floor. An optometry suite featured five examining rooms, and a medical practice once doubled as a walk-in clinic – and could work again as an urgent-care facility to take some pressure off Northumberland Hills Hospital.
On the second floor, a practice of four Cobourg Health Centre physicians grew to nine while they were on site. A child-friendly family-physician suite with six examining rooms was just repainted last year. An unfinished suite at the building’s south end, flooded with natural light, was intended as a dental practice.
The top floor offered a cardiologist’s services and other clinical spaces.
And the basement is well lit, due to an overhead fixture with glass panes that open up to the ground-floor atrium. Much of it is open space, roomy enough for recreational opportunities like concerts, though it is currently occupied by two pool tables. In the northeast corner is a suite that would make a wonderful wellness facility with its examining room, exercise area, shower, laundry facilities and a cut-out for a hot tub.
As he keeps his own health-related appointments at different locations, Klaczkowski’s vision of a multiplicity of services offered at a single convenient location is one he believes could make a difference to the community – if only he could get that first tenant (or two or three) on the premises.
For more information, contact him at mjkbuilding@hotmail.com
