Health center in fight over its growth

Even as medical facilities across Los Angeles County cut vital services they can no longer afford, a hospital in the San Fernando Valley faces an uphill battle this week to win permission to build a 101-bed expansion.

Providence Holy Cross Medical Center wants to add 119,000 square feet to its facility in Mission Hills, a proposal that has sparked an intense lobbying campaign involving the five county supervisors and the region’s most powerful labor official, among others.

Union leaders, neighborhood councils and a Los Angeles city councilman all are demanding a more detailed review of the project’s effect on communities stretching from Sylmar to Granada Hills. Leading the charge is the pro-union Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which called on the hospital to complete a detailed environmental study -- one that possibly would delay the new Providence wing by at least 18 months.

Healthcare executives say the coalition is little more than a labor-organizing campaign, one that is using the state’s environmental laws as a cudgel to punish the Providence chain for its rocky relations with healthcare unions at facilities up and down the West Coast. Those executives warned that an 18-month delay could force patients to travel farther for treatment in a county where 10 emergency rooms have closed since 2002.

It “is not an environmental issue. This is unions gone mad,” said Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California. “And this should be a no-brainer for our elected officials in Los Angeles.”

The hospital plans to reserve half of its new beds for patients admitted to the emergency room, which has had a 56% increase in traffic since 2003. An additional 35 beds will be part of a neonatal unit, according to Providence officials.

The expansion comes up for a vote this week at the Los Angeles City Council, where at least six of its 15 members say they still are undecided.

The issue is only the latest example of labor activists using environmental and quality-of-life issues as crucial leverage in places where they want to improve wages and expand union membership.

Last year, a campaign for higher hourly wages at hotels near Los Angeles International Airport promised to reduce blight along Century Boulevard by making the higher pay part of a “community benefits zone” that would pay for landscaping and other improvements. And at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Teamsters Union has campaigned for a clean-air plan that would phase out 16,000 diesel trucks -- and, at the same time, unionize each of the independent drivers.

Both of those initiatives were backed by the pro-union alliance, which released a lengthy report Friday saying that the hospital addition would produce 1,600 car trips per day, reduce parking and make the area difficult to evacuate during a wildfire or earthquake.

“Traffic is not just an annoyance. Parking is not just an annoyance. When traffic is backed up, you have cars idling in a community that is already being impacted” by pollution, said Maria Loya, the alliance’s director of public policy. “You have a large concentration of residents who suffer from asthma.”

Loya contends that her group’s message comes from residents of the community, with five neighborhood councils signing on. Yet Loya confirmed that her group was backed financially in part by the United Healthcare Workers, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that only last week described Providence as “notorious for their union-busting activity.”

Barbara Lewis, a vice president with United Healthcare Workers West in Los Angeles, said her group had long pressed Providence for an agreement that would make it easier for nurses and other healthcare workers to organize. But she said those issues were unrelated to her group’s push for an environmental impact report.

“I want you to be clear,” she said. “Our role in the coalition is about the impact of the expansion.”

Council members say they already have received calls and visits from the healthcare workers union, the alliance and Maria Elena Durazo, the powerful head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Durazo, a close friend and advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, was not known as someone focused on traffic and parking issues.

The hospital, in turn, lined up an expensive lobbying team that includes Loyola Marymount University professor Fernando Guerra and Tim McOsker, chief of staff to former Mayor James Hahn.

The two sides have engaged in a fierce debate over the need for an environmental impact report. Providence lobbyists produced a list of hospital projects in Los Angeles -- two as large as 500,000 square feet -- that won approval with no environmental impact report. Hospital critics responded with their own list, showing medical facilities as far away as Orange County that complied with the lengthier review.

The Board of Supervisors, which runs the county’s five public hospitals, said no environmental impact report should be required.

But the councilman who represents Mission Hills sided with the labor alliance, saying the issue was about traffic and planning and little else.

“You wouldn’t want to rush drugs to the market before they’ve had a full FDA process,” said Councilman Richard Alarcon, whose district includes the hospital. “We ought not to move this project forward before it has the environmental scrutiny it deserves.”

Other council members are far more skittish, even those who typically embrace union endeavors.

“It’s a tough one,” said Councilwoman Janice Hahn, a vocal backer of other alliance campaigns. “It’s the hospital side of it that gets me on this, particularly since we’re closing hospitals.”

Undecided council members point out that the building trade unions have broken with the alliance, in large part because the hospital project would provide that union with construction jobs. They also said Providence won support from the Mission Hills Neighborhood Council, whose territory includes the hospital.

But one councilman was so concerned about Providence’s relationship with the unions that he telephoned Durazo while he was meeting with a hospital executive about the project.

“I called her in front of him,” Councilman Bill Rosendahl recalled. “I said, ‘I need to hear from you and what your issues are.’ ”

Villaraigosa is far more circumspect. Although his appointees on the planning commission voted in favor of the project in July, mayoral spokesman Matt Szabo said Friday that Villaraigosa had no position on the issue.

Providence is not the only hospital targeted by United Healthcare Workers in California. The union waged a similar, if much more aggressive, campaign in Northern California against the hospital chain Sutter Health, going so far as to sue over a proposed hospital in Sacramento.

Representatives of Sutter said the United Healthcare Workers fought efforts to expand or renovate its other hospitals in Northern California, and even tried to block the state from providing money. Lott, the hospital association executive, argued that the union was pursuing a similar, but quieter, strategy in Los Angeles.

“They made no bones about it” in Northern California, Lott said. “They said, ‘Let us organize, or we will block all your expansion plans.’ And that’s the same thing going on down here.”

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david.zahniser@latimes.com

steve.hymon@latimes.com