Artesia General Hospital unveils master plan for Pecos Springs Regional Hospital and health‑care village

Jeremy Kern, project manager and owner’s representative for Artesia General Hospital and the Artesia Special Hospital District, presented a multi‑phase master plan for a new 70‑acre North Campus and a proposed 320,000‑square‑foot Pecos Springs Regional Hospital to the Eddy County Commission.

Kern said the board and hospital leadership concluded a replacement hospital on a new campus was more practical than a piecemeal renovation of the existing 1981 facility. “We’re scoping this to be a level 2 facility,” Kern told commissioners, describing plans for an expanded emergency department, surgical suites, imaging, expanded inpatient capacity and a shell‑ready third floor for future growth.

The plan includes a mixed “health‑care village” around the hospital — about 43 mid‑tier single‑family homes targeted as workforce housing, 84 townhome‑style units and roughly a dozen units the district would build and retain for staff housing. Kern said the district is aiming for affordability targets on the single‑family units to support local recruitment.

Kern said the new hospital footprint would start with roughly 64 beds expandable to 128 and about eight operating rooms with robotic technology; the campus would also include medical office buildings, outpatient services, an education/training component intended to develop local clinical staff, and supporting utilities infrastructure such as a CVE substation and a city lift station.

Kern and others described an adaptive‑reuse plan for the existing Artesia campus that would convert parts of the current hospital into senior duplex housing, a 25‑unit assisted living wing, a 27‑bed nursing home, an expanded rehabilitation and adult‑day‑care unit, a behavioral health unit and four inpatient psychiatric beds. Kern said reuse would be less costly than demolition, which the presentation estimated at about $20 million.

Kern said the board will proceed with programming, design and a technology review (named Big Bear AI) to analyze workflow, patient movement and projected population needs across a 20‑ to 50‑year horizon. He asked the county to consider the hospital district a stakeholder in countywide planning and to look for ways the county could coordinate on shared needs such as workforce housing and infrastructure.

Dr. Salgado (from the hospital C‑suite) and Jared Moreau, chair of the Special Hospital District board, joined Kern for the presentation and fielded commissioner questions about workforce recruitment, relationships with Carlsbad and regional service areas.

Kern emphasized the project focus on retaining care in‑county for families who currently travel out of the area for specialty and inpatient services, and on training local health workers to improve recruitment and retention.

The presentation was received as informational; commissioners asked follow‑up questions but took no formal county action during the meeting.