ELLSWORTH – The local hospital has reached its capital campaign goal and is approximately halfway complete with a major expansion project, according to the facility’s top administrator.

Maine Coast Memorial Hospital has raised the $5.5 million it hoped to raise to help pay for a $10.5 million addition, MCMH President and CEO Doug Jones said Tuesday. In reaching that goal, the hospital is ending its capital campaign that has been chaired by Dr. Frederick E. Hutchinson, he said.

Just because the hospital has raised the money doesn’t mean it is not interested in accepting more donations, according to Jones. He said that by raising more money, the hospital would be able to buy needed new equipment outright instead of leasing it.

“I’m not eager to get into leases,” the hospital president said.

New equipment that the hospital hopes to acquire includes surgical lights, surgical tables and anesthesia machines that will be used in the hospital’s new operating rooms, Jones said. One anesthesia machine can cost as much as $80,000, he said.

Jones said the hospital had been advised by consultants when it began the capital campaign in 2002 that it should not expect to be able to raise all the money it wanted.

“The $5.5 million [goal] they said was definitely a stretch,” he said. The hospital official credited Hutchinson and Winter Harbor philanthropist F. Eugene Dixon, who, with his wife, Edith Dixon, gave $1.5 million toward the campaign, with helping make the $5.5 million goal possible.

Jones said the project is expected to be completed sometime in April 2005.

Besides new operating rooms, the 25,000-square-foot expansion project will include a new intensive care unit and a new food service facility, hospital officials have said.

The renovation also includes changes to 20,000 square feet of existing space, including the hospital’s outpatient surgery, emergency medicine, maternity and reception areas.

Also considered part of the hospital’s overall expansion plans are a recently completed MRI center at the hospital’s main campus, a proposed primary care building near the intersection of U.S. Route 1 and High Street, and a planned medical building at the back of the main hospital’s Union Street parking lot.