The hospital system that operates AdventHealth Avista in Louisville recently purchased a plot of land within the Redtail Ridge district for $34 million.

This newly acquired property near the U.S. Highway 36 and Northwest Parkway interchange is likely where AdventHealth Avista intends to build a new hospital to replace the existing facility at 100 Health Park Drive.

For the past half-decade, developers, including the property’s current owner and master developer Sterling Bay LLC, have had their sights set on building a 2.55-million-square-foot biotechnology- and health care-centric business park on the roughly 300-acre Redtail Ridge property, which was previously home to a massive Storage Technology Corp. campus. A new AdventHealth Avista hospital — the hospital system had been under contract to purchase a roughly 40-acre tract within the property for about three years — has long been considered a key element in the broader Redtail vision.

Boulder County real estate records show that Redtail Ridge Portfolio LLC, an entity registered to the Chicago address of Sterling Bay’s offices, sold the parcel to Portercare Adventist Health System, an entity registered to AdventHealth’s regional office in Greenwood Village, in mid-February.

Hospital leaders have long said that Avista suffers from accessibility issues. The hospital’s vulnerabilities were highlighted during the Marshall Fire in December 2021.

The site is accessed only by Health Park Drive, which dead-ends at the hospital. Over the years, the hospital has been unsuccessful in securing a new interchange off of U.S. Highway 36. Poor access adds to the time required to reach the facility, making it difficult to attract new patients.

Additionally, Avista’s landlocked location does not offer opportunities to expand, hospital officials have said, with the community missing out on potential new services because the hospital has no room to grow. A new hospital at Redtail Ridge would provide Avista with a far larger market service area, putting it closer to a wider population base.

Representatives with Avista and Sterling Bay were not made available for comment prior to publication of this story.

Denver developer Brue Baukol Capital Partners LLC bought the entire Redtail property from Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) in 2020 for $34.93 million. As part of a July 2022 real estate transaction conducted by a series of holding companies, Sterling Bay acquired the site from Brue Baukol for just under $128 million, Boulder County warranty deeds show. When Sterling Bay entered the picture, the developer added plans for flex-lab-office spaces aimed at biotechnology tenants.

Concerns from residents — mostly centering around flattening of the site, traffic, the size and location of public spaces, sustainability and economic viability — nagged Redtail Ridge for years, culminating in an April 2022 special election in which Louisville voters repealed a previous approval of the project by city officials.

After the election, allowable development on the site reverted to a set of land-use guidelines approved in 2010, and Sterling Bay has since worked through the city’s entitlement and approvals process in an effort to finally begin development on the Redtail site.