Mount Nittany Health is planning a new facility that will consolidate and expand its services in Bellefonte.
The Centre County-based health system intends to construct a two-story, 40,000-square foot medical office building immediately east of its corporate offices at 945 E. Bishop St., Mark Saville of project engineer HRG said in a sketch plan overview at Tuesday night’s Bellefonte Borough Council meeting. The parcel is currently vacant and includes a piece of the former Bellefonte Armory property.
The new building will include a walk-in express care clinic and imaging clinic and relocate Mount Nittany’s Bellefonte-area primary care and pediatric practices from their spaces on Medical Park Lane. It will also serve as a new home for the Children’s Advocacy Center.
“We’re looking forward to bringing more of these services back into Bellefonte at this location,” Saville said.
An existing driveway that had been used for entrance to the Armory property will be relocated slightly east “for better sight distance, but also it’s important for the operational elements of access to the building so that it’s obvious to people who are arriving where the entrance to the building is and it doesn’t become a confusing traffic pattern.”
The new driveway will be full movement. A traffic impact analysis is in process, but Saville said it is not expected a traffic signal will be required. A new signal at the Airport Road intersection for the new Bellefonte Elementary School will not be coordinated with the Mount Nittany facility, but “it’s going to create some gaps associated with the movement of the vehicles coming in for the full access portion of it,” Saville added.
Parking will be located at the sides and rear of the building, and the parcel will have a connection to the adjacent administrative office property.
A solid six-foot fence will be installed at the back of the new building to provide screening for the adjacent residential neighborhood to the north.
The sketch plan was presented to gain initial feedback from council. Saville said a formal land development plan submission will be forthcoming “in a month or so.”
The planned new Bellefonte facility is another step in Mount Nittany Health’s ongoing growth in the region.
In 2024, the health system completed a new $90 million, 125,000-square-foot outpatient center at Toftrees and opened its first urgent care walk-in clinic in the Hills Plaza.
Work on its largest recent investment continues at the medical center, where a $350 million, 10-story patient tower is under construction and expected to open late this year. Other major recent projects at the hospital have included a new $9 million clinical laboratory completed in 2023 and a multi-phase renovation of the diagnostic pavilion completed earlier this year.
A renovation and expansion project for Mount Nittany’s Boalsburg pediatrics office, meanwhile, is expected to be completed in mid-2026.
The system acquired the former State College Family Medicine on Sandy Drive in Ferguson Township for $2.3 million in August.
Mount Nittany also acquired a 15.71-acre parcel on Rishel Hill Road near Benner Pike in Bellefonte for $6.284 million in December 2024, though it has not disclosed plans for the site, and it purchased the office building property at 1700 Old Gatesburg Road in Ferguson Township — where Mount Nittany has primary care, imaging and lab services — for $15.1 million in July 2024.
