The rattle and thunder of demolition has echoed out in recent weeks from the top floor of 34 Mark West Springs Road, a three-story medical office building next to Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital.

Ceilings, walls and floors were being ripped out. Construction workers were sawing through light gauge steel framing, piling scrap metal, wood and drywall into heaps on the bare concrete floors.

The work is part of Sutter Health’s latest major expansion in Sonoma County: a $10 million, 10,000 square-foot project that will see Sutter become the sole occupant of the three-story building erected 11 years ago, the same year its new regional hospital was completed.

The top-floor space under renovation, previously leased by a private medical group and consisting of roughly half of the third floor, will house Sutter’s orthopedics and podiatry departments, along with a dedicated X-ray imaging suite, all of which required significant remodeling and facility improvements.

The building is owned by Healthcare Realty Trust, the largest operator and developer of medical outpatient buildings in the country.

The work is Sutter’s latest in a series of major projects in the region. Only nine months ago, Sutter unveiled its Rohnert Park Care Center, $16.9 million medical complex that includes urgent and primary care, imaging services including CT scan and ultrasound, and rotating specialty services such as obstetrics.

Construction at 34 Mark West Springs Road is expected to be completed within a year’s time.

“This (project) is a milestone on its own because of the size,” said Felix Torres, director of medical and surgical specialties for Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation-North. “But it’s also part of a bigger growth strategy.”

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Sutter has taken over full occupancy of the three-story medical office building next to Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital on Mark West Springs Road in Santa Rosa. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat) in Santa Rosa on Wednesday, December 17, 2025. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat)

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That strategy includes a hiring spree. This year, the health care giant’s affiliated Sutter Medical Group of the Redwoods hired 25 primary and specialty health care workers, and next year the group expects to hire another 75 doctors and advanced practice clinicians.

Dr. Michael Maggnoti, president and CEO of Sutter Medical Group of the Redwoods, pointed out that the group has 150 doctors and clinicians. Adding another 75 would represent unprecedented growth.

“We’re actually hiring clinicians at a faster rate than we have space for them,” Maggnoti said.

At the moment, Sutter’s orthopedics and podiatry services are located on the first floor of the three-story medical complex on Airway Drive, on the west side of Highway 101.

Rebecca Plunk, Sutter Health’s senior construction project manager in the North Bay, said moving podiatry and orthopedics to the east side of the freeway, will allow Sutter to “backfill” the vacated space at Airway Drive, including expanding its imaging services.

“It just seems like you can never get a quick enough referral and appointment for an MRI or CT scan,” Plunk said. “So they want to make sure they can put more advanced imaging services over into the Airway building.”

An inch here and there

The new project will yield 28 medical exam rooms, which at full capacity will allow Sutter medical staff to see 600 patients a day, said Torres. At Airway Drive, there were 16 exam rooms for Sutter’s orthopedics and podiatry departments.

Plunk, who headed the construction of the Rohnert Park medical complex, said the latest project has more exam rooms in a smaller footprint than 14,000 square-foot Rohnert Park site. The Rohnert Park complex has 24 exam rooms, compared to 28 at Mark West Springs Road.

In the new Santa Rosa site, doctors will have shared office spaces that are surrounded by patient exam rooms.

“The doctors are going to share offices rather than having individual offices — that allowed for more patient care space,” she said.

Plunk said her team “squeezed every inch” out of the available space to make the facility as efficient as possible, while still meeting health care construction standards and ADA accessibility requirements.

“I  don’t think that any of the patients will notice that we squeezed an inch or two out of the length of every room,” Plunk said.

Rapid growth

Sutter’s buildout of the Rohnert Park medical complex took less than a year to complete. In Santa Rosa, Sutter held a Dec. 10 groundbreaking for its new project, with plans to start treating patients there by this coming December.

With that kind of rapid turnaround, Sutter is already planning its next expansions.

The next major project — funded and approved — involves buildout of a cardiology center at 18 E. Fulton Road, the site of a former dialysis center two blocks from the hospital. Sutter’s cardiology services, currently occupying the other half of the third floor of 34 Mark West Springs Road, would be moved to E. Fulton Road site.

Maggnoti said Sutter is also currently planning an expansion of its primary care office in Petaluma that would quadruple its size, adding imaging services, urgent care, and specialty medical services. That project would be even larger than Rohnert Park, he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.