Providence hospital execs ask LA city council to green light expansion

Officials at Providence-Holy Cross Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley want the Los Angeles City Council to reapprove their building project fast. KPCC's Patricia Nazario has more about the hold-up. The structural steel is up for the 136 bed extension building at Providence Holy Cross Hospital in the San Fernando Valley. Hospital officials are waiting for a re-authorization to resume building.

Patricia Nazario: Providence Holy Cross's 120,000 square foot expansion project could come to a screeching halt. That's because hospital officials started it before they completed a full environmental impact report.

The new space is designed to hold 136 new hospital beds. It would meet California's latest earthquake standards and officials say it'll be the state's greenest medical facility.

As other regional hospitals are reducing services or shutting down, emergency room manager Kelly Kurcz says the expansion reverses the trend – especially in the emergency room, where patients almost always have to wait until beds free up.

Kelly Kurcz: How does that affect the community? If we were holding 23 patients during the Metrolink disaster, our emergency department wouldn't have been able to receive 17 critically-ill patients from that disaster.

Nazario: On that day, Kurcz says, hospital staff shuffled patients to other areas so they could admit casualties from the commuter train collision last September. Providence-Holy Cross chief Kerry Carmody says the facility expansion secured approval last year.

But an L.A. County superior court judge called that approval process flawed and ordered construction to stop. Now, Carmody says, its building plans have returned to the L.A. City Council for a revote.

Kerry Carmody: So, we're hoping that revote is sooner rather than later, because every day we're delayed is a day a patient is without a bed and a day someone is without work.

Nazario: The building site's construction foreman says he let six workers go last week alone in anticipation of the delay. L.A. city Councilman Richard Alarcon, whose district includes the hospital, says that he supports the expansion, but also that he believes it needs an environmental impact report to protect the surrounding neighborhoods. Hospital officials say completing the report would delay the expansion by almost two years – and would cost millions of dollars.