NATCHEZ — Standing in the freshly renovated lobby of Natchez Regional Medical Center everything looks great.

But despite the new look inside the hospital, outside the hospital, some major repairs are needed.

The facility is currently in need of new chilling towers for the air conditioning system, a new parking lot and a new roof, hospital CEO Scott Phillips said.

And the work needed at the hospital is best viewed from the roof.

Standing on the facility’s roof Regional’s Assistant Vice President of Resource Management Ron Wood points at the corroded filters on the chilling tower.

“It’s and old piece of equipment,” he said. “And it needs to be replaced.”

Phillips said he’s hoping to have the towers replaced before the summer in order to keep the hospital running.

If the towers were to stop working, the entire system would fail and would close the hospital.

“We’d lose all of our internal air conditioning, and we cannot have that,” Phillips said.

Wood said the filters in the chiller are what actually need to be replaced, but the entire unit is so old that it’s cost prohibitive to replace the only the filters.

“This makes a lot more sense,” he said.

And while the tower is being replaced, the hospital will also be re-roofed.

Black patches dot sections of roof where the heavy membrane that covers the hospital has started to leak.

In other spots across the roof the membrane has started to separate from the roof’s surface.

Wood said while the roof does not leak with every rain, any heavy sustained rains will result in water leaking into the hospital.

Both Phillips and Wood said there hasn’t been any leaking in patient rooms.

“So far we’ve been able to divert all of the leaks,” Wood said.

Notice to accept bids for the roof and chilling tower work should be made in the coming weeks, Wood said.

Once bids are received, Wood is hoping to have the work completed by early summer.

But the work needed at the hospital is costly.

Phillips said he estimates the project will cost up to $800,000.

And while the work isn’t cheap, it been deferred for years and needs to be taken care of, Phillips said.

“It’s a big expense,” he said. “But it’s work that needs to be done to keep the facility running.”

While plans to fund the project have not been finalized, the hospital does have the internal cash flow to pay for the work and still has an unused $3 million line of credit with United Mississippi Bank, which could also be used, Phillips said.

Phillips also said he understands how some of the hospital’s debtors could be confused as to why the hospital is doing repair work instead of paying down debts.

“This is what we have to do,” he said. “If this work does not get done and we had to close for repairs, that would be devastating for debtors.”

There is currently no timetable or cost estimate for the resurfacing work to be done on the parking lot.

Wood said a roadwork project currently being done by the Mississippi Department of Transportation has the potential to change the size and shape of the parking lot and no work will be done until the MDOT project is complete.