Cement trucks are as common as ambulances at Orange County hospitals these days.
The county’s major hospitals are in the throes of a building boom, adding patient towers, emergency rooms, parking structures, even a chapel.
The hospitals are expanding to serve the county’s growing population. But there’s also a stick: a state deadline to guarantee that they can withstand an earthquake by 2013 and to be able to keep operating after a quake by 2030.
Now some hospitals across the state want more time.
Hospitals are backing a bill by state Sen. Jackie Speier, a San Francisco Democrat, which would push back compliance for withstanding an earthquake until 2020.
If Speier’s bill becomes law, hospitals would get an extra seven years to replace buildings that don’t meet earthquake safety standards.
The Trade-off
The hospitals also would lose something under the bill. They’d have to meet the requirement to stay open after a big quake by 2020, 10 years earlier than under the current law.
California’s earthquake safety law, passed after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, requires hospitals to retrofit their facilities.
For larger hospitals in OC, the extra time isn’t as big an issue. They’re already under way with big expansions designed to meet the state requirements and to serve growth in the number of patients they expect.
Smaller hospital operators that haven’t started on upgrades could benefit.
Pushing out the deadline would be “beneficial,” said Larry Anderson, chief executive of Costa Mesa-based Integrated Healthcare Holdings Inc., owner of four OC hospitals.
The seismic rules are more onerous for operators of hospital towers, Anderson said. Integrated plans to have a “significant conversation” with state regulators about Western Medical Center-Santa Ana, its largest hospital, he said.
Integrated plans to retrofit Western-Santa Ana’s patient tower, which was built in the mid-1970s. But the company isn’t going to replace it, he said.
“We think (the tower) meets most of the legal requirements,” Anderson said.
West Anaheim Medical Center, a midsize hospital that’s part of Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanguard Health Systems Inc., would benefit from a time extension, “just as most hospitals would,” spokeswoman Debra Culver said.
An extension would help 219-bed West Anaheim with budgeting for upgrades, she said.
West Anaheim is planning to do some upgrades on older parts of its hospital. But “it’s not the same enormity of requirements” that other hospitals have done, Culver said.
The California Hospital Association, a Sacramento-based trade group, has called extending the deadline for hospitals its top priority for 2006.
Speier’s proposed legislation passed during the Senate’s last session but got hung up in the Assembly and was reworked into a two-year bill that’s awaiting an Assembly vote.
The bill isn’t necessarily a slam dunk.
The California Nurses Association and the Service Employees International Union, which typically oppose efforts backed by the hospital association, have lined up against Speier’s proposal.
OC’s biggest hospitals are on track to meet the 2013 deadline, at least with the bulk of their expansion plans.
Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach just opened its $200 million, 320,000-square-foot Sue and Bill Gross Women’s Pavilion. Other construction is in the works or is planned.
“Even so, the extension would be very (advantageous) to the hospital,” said Debra Legan, a Hoag spokeswoman, “in order to continue moving forward with that construction in a logical sequence.”
Hoag and other hospitals that are ahead of the game worry that they could be overwhelmed if other facilities don’t meet the deadline.
“The community does not have the capacity for hospitals to close due to these current deadlines,” Legan said. “Overstressing those who can meet the deadlines would have a negative impact on the healthcare of the entire community.”
The extension would be a mixed bag for St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton.
The hospital is expanding and should have a five-story patient tower done by 2008, well ahead of the 2013 deadline.
But St. Jude planned to upgrade other parts of the 50-year campus within the 2030 time frame for staying open after a quake.
Under Speier’s bill, St. Jude would have to wrap up a decade earlier.
“The shortened time frame would not allow for the entire campus build-out,” said Dru Ann Copping, a St. Jude spokeswoman.
Rising Building Costs
Hospitals, like office and condominium developers, face rising construction costs, which are growing about 20% a year, according to Davis Langdon Seah, a construction consulting firm with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
At the end of 2003, hospital construction costs were $330 per square foot. They were $550 per square foot as of January.
Higher costs for steel, concrete and other materials led UCI Medical Center in Orange to put out a second round of construction bids for its proposed hospital in 2004.
The teaching hospital originally budgeted $245 million to replace part of its central facility, which was built in the 1960s.
UCI is set to spend $370 million on its new structure, which is slated to open by late 2008.
