Boulder hospitals and medical centers may have some wiggle room when it comes to expanding.

The Boulder City Council adopted the second reading of an ordinance in its Thursday virtual meeting that amends various aspects of the city’s land use code. Changes will go into effect should the council adopt the consent agenda at its June 26 meeting.

Central to the discussion was one amendment that could increase the height of hospital buildings in a public zoning district. Should the consent agenda be adopted, a hospital would be allowed to request approval from the city’s planning board for a height modification for three-story buildings above a 35-foot height limit and to the city maximum of 55 feet. As it stands in the land use code, only a limited set of three-story buildings can be considered.

Hospitals often have higher floor plates — the vertical space between consecutive floor levels in a building — to account for mechanical needs for its equipment. That can clash with a city’s pre-existing height limitations for buildings.

At the center of that conversation is Boulder Community Health, whose main Foothills Hospital campus, at 4747 Arapahoe Ave., is in a public zone.

City staffers who presented the ordinance to the council recommended that the amendment be adopted as hospitals are a community benefit and, therefore, should have an exception. Of the eight present councilmembers, seven voted in favor and one, Taishya Adams, opposed based on wording concerns and public engagement around other changes to the code. The city’s planning board opposed the amendment. “For me, this is something I would really, really, really like to see approved. I don’t understand some of planning board’s reasoning on this,” said city councilmember Mark Wallach. “I think this is absolutely the right case for them to be able to do an expansion that they and the community desperately need.”

Planning board member Laura Kaplan spoke during the public hearing portion of the discussion. While speaking specifically for herself, she said that the board understands the value BCH brings and that it should have a clearer path to expansion. “We don’t think that this zoning change is the way to do it,” Kaplan said. “It’s too complicated, there’s too many moving parts here. We didn’t think it was quite baked, and we didn’t think it was appropriate for this level of code cleanup.”

Representatives from Boulder Community Health, a nonprofit, spoke virtually during the public hearing to urge the council to vote in favor of the ordinance.

Darryl Brown, associate vice president of strategy and business development at BCH, said more space is needed for the organization to do some of its basic functions and to avoid capacity issues.

Rob Vissers, the CEO of BCH, said the organization wants to add more beds to its emergency department and level-two trauma center, as it grapples with a sharp increase in visits and demand for services.

“Since the COVID-19 pandemic (began), we’ve had a backlog of surgeries and illness, but patients are far more complex and the resources that are needed are more intensive,” Vissers said. “We’re getting to the point where we’re having capacity constraints around our medical and surgical beds.”