Northside Hospital Forsyth Staff Shifted to Off-Site Parking During Expansion

Lynn Jackson, president and CEO of Northside Hospital Forsyth, put all 4,600 of the 407-bed hospital's employees on notice March 30: leave your car at the Cumming Fairgrounds and shuttle in, a commute disruption expected to last through fall 2026 while an $80 million expansion remakes the campus on Northside Forsyth Drive.

The mandatory off-site lot sits at 320 Castleberry Road, with shuttle service running Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. There is no coverage on weekends or holidays, meaning staff who work Saturday and Sunday shifts, or anyone arriving after 9 p.m. on a weekday, may instead park at any on-site employee lot or on the third and fourth floors of the existing parking deck. Two marked entrances lead into the fairgrounds lot; the hospital directs employees to park near the staging tent and fill outward from there. A live shuttle-tracking portal allows staff to monitor pickup times before leaving their vehicles.

The requirement applies across the workforce: nurses, physicians, support personnel and rotating students and visiting clinical faculty all fall under the new policy. Patients and visitors retain access to on-site parking, though active construction has altered wayfinding and shifted drop-off access near several entry points. Anyone with an outpatient appointment should build in extra arrival time and expect modified signage, particularly for early-morning visits when construction activity is heaviest. Patients with mobility needs should call 770-844-3200 before arriving to confirm current ADA drop-off locations and accessible entry points relative to the active construction zone.

The construction footprint driving the parking shortage belongs to the 2500 Medical Office Building, a four-story, 120,000-square-foot structure that will become the campus's sixth medical office building. The project is already 98 percent leased more than a year before its projected late fall 2026 opening. At the August 2025 groundbreaking, Jackson described it as "yet another milestone in the tremendous growth that we've had over the last two decades."

When complete, the expansion will add a parking garage with capacity for nearly 900 vehicles and a direct-access connection to Deputy Bill Cantrell Highway. The gap between today's fairgrounds shuttle and that 900-space garage is the core tension employees are living through: contractor staging areas, construction vehicle lanes and safety buffers have consumed the same lots that previously held their cars.

Some staff have raised concerns about the absence of weekend shuttle service, exposure at the open-air fairgrounds lot and whether transit time will count as compensated hours. The hospital has not publicly addressed those questions.

Alex Warner, president and CEO of the Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce, placed the project in a broader frame at the groundbreaking, calling Northside "the anchor point now for multiple international businesses" weighing Forsyth County as a relocation destination. For a building that was 98 percent spoken for before a single exam room opened, the walk to the shuttle tent each morning is the short-term cost of expanding faster than Forsyth County is growing, and that county is growing very fast.