Planned Yulee, Fla., Medical Park Will Serve Nassau County

Jul. 13–Developers of a medical park planned for Yulee hope to ride the coattails of the area’s blistering population.

The 2.4-acre Amelia Medical Park, at the southwest intersection of Florida A1A and Old Church Street, will include three buildings totaling about 21,000 square feet and cost about $12 million.

The complex will include a roughly 9,000-square-foot urgent care center and a physical therapy unit, said Daniel Matricia, an emergency medicine physician who is developing the park along with Wise Inc., a Muncie, Ind.-based medical real estate developer.

Another building is expected to house a surgery center while a third will be home to physicians offices.

The park is expected to open in mid-2006 and employ nearly 30 people when fully operational. The jobs, which will include nurses, lab technicians and physical therapists, will pay an average of between $20 and $40 an hour.

Roughly 15 to 20 physicians, including surgeons, family practitioners and radiologists, will also practice at the medical park.

The proposed park, just off Amelia Island in Yulee, is expected to attract patients from both on and off the island, Matricia said. The urgent care center alone expects to see nearly 20,000 patients in the first year.

“It’s a high population growth area,” Matricia said.

Nassau County’s population is expected to grow about 5 percent annually over the next five years, county administrator Mike Mahaney said.

About 5,000 homes in the area — between the Intracoastal Waterway and U.S. 17 — have already been approved, Mahaney said.

“The bottom line is, there is significant development occurring in this area of Nassau County which is, I’m sure, why [the medical park developers] are pursuing this,” he said. “Obviously they wouldn’t be building if they didn’t think they could make money.”

There’s a market for additional health services because of a growing population, said Lori Bilello, executive director of the Health Planning Council of Northeast Florida, a health policy research agency. In addition to a spurt in population, the area is also attracting high-end housing, Bilello said.

That means “people who have health insurance and have money to pay for these services,” she said.

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