When the city of Cape Coral opened its employee Health & Wellness Center two years ago, it was met with some skepticism by the community.

Two years later, it has become a place where employees, their families and retirees have gone to have their health care needs met. So much, in fact, that the facility may need to be expended, either by more staff or longer hours.

Dustin Keane of the Gehring Group spoke to the Cape Coral City Council during a non-voting workshop about the two years of data that has been collected on the return on investment for the facility.

The city opened the center in March 2020 with the goal of shifting select medical services away from the heath insurance plan to a lower cost model to mitigate medical inflation.

The fire department joined the plan in January 2021.

After a slow start, the center has seen sharp year to year growth.

Medical appointments increased 14 percent from the first to second year, ancillary appointments rose 23 percent, occupational appointments doubled after the fire department joined in, and total appointment increased 33 percent.

The study, which went until March 2022, showed the center was near capacity the last few months, including 99 percent in March, with 94 percent capacity per month in 2021-22, as opposed to 75 percent in 2020-21, again caused by the slow rollout.

Unique employees visited jumped from 218 times per month in 2020-21 to 289 per month in 2021-22. Dependent growth also rose sharply, and medications dispensed more than doubled.

Depending on the methodology used, the return on investment is between $1.1 million and $1.4 million.

Mayor John Gunter said things looked to be trending in the right direction.

Council also welcomed Tommy Doyle, Lee County Supervisor of Elections, who gave an update on General Election voting.

Doyle sent a petition to Gov. Ron DeSantis on Oct. 2 requesting vote centers instead of election day precincts, which was approved 10 days later.

“Our assessment is with the displacement of the population and the damage to polling locations, the logistics of getting equipment and poll workers on election day in order to do this and make sure everyone had a place to go to vote made this necessary,” Doyle said.

Lee County’s 12 early voting sites will be open Election Day, which will replace traditional precinct voting on Nov. 8.

In other business, council heard from Mark Mason, Financial Services director, who did a second take on his presentation on financial management policy.

The previous week, members on council said they felt uncomfortable with what they had heard, so Mason gave them a more simplified presentation.