Encino Hospital to Close; Townhouses May Be Built on Site

The AMI Rancho Encino Hospital will close Aug. 1 and the building may be replaced by townhouses, according to hospital officials and City Councilman Marvin Braude’s office.

Once a full-service, 102-bed hospital, Rancho Encino stopped caring for acutely ill patients in October 1989, and has operated only a 15-bed nursing care unit and an outpatient arthritis program since then, said David Langness, vice president of communications for the Hospital Council of Southern California.

“Some companies are realizing that land values are greater than the minimal profits, if any, they can make as skilled nursing facilities,” Langness said.

The hospital is on the west side of the 3300 block of Balboa Boulevard, between the Ventura Freeway and Ventura Boulevard.

The AMI Corp. owns not only Rancho Encino but also the Tarzana and North Hollywood medical centers. Lois Green, vice president of AMI’s Tarzana hospital, said services provided at the Encino hospital were duplicated in both the Tarzana and North Hollywood institutions, adding to rising medical costs.

AMI, which was acquired in April by IMA Holdings Corp. and is trying to sell $1 billion in assets, did not decide to keep the Encino hospital open as a nursing care facility because the corporation’s expertise is in acute-care hospitals, Green said.

One developer interested in purchasing the 4.4-acre hospital property said there has been a “tremendous” amount of interest in the land since it became known that AMI was interested in selling it several months ago at a rumored price between $8 million and $10 million.

“It’s Encino, and it’s a big piece of property,” said the developer, who asked not to be publicly identified. “There are not many of those left.”

Neighboring homeowners met last week with Cindy Miscikowski, Braude’s chief aide, to complain that townhouses would add to traffic problems and undermine the character of Genesta Street, which borders the property to the west.

“The hospital was a good neighbor,” homeowner Shelley Krall said.

Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, a 1,000-member neighborhood association, said substituting townhouses for a hospital would amount to “losing an asset and gaining a liability. This is not progress when they destroy a hospital and start packing in people like sardines.”

Public hearings and environmental studies would be required before the sprawling property could be zoned for townhouses or apartment buildings, Miscikowski said.

The property is zoned for large, single-family houses, and the hospital has operated there under a special permit, Miscikowski said. She said the zoning probably would not be changed for the hospital property that faces upscale Genesta Street, a block of large residences.

Miscikowski said her office has been contacted by four or five “potentially eager buyers” of the property in recent months, but that all were interested in building townhouses or condominiums instead of retaining the site as a hospital or nursing care facility.

Dawn Schneider, communications director of the California Assn. of Health Facilities, said there are 45 long-term and skilled nursing facilities in the San Fernando Valley, but that more will be needed as the population ages.

Langness said that skilled nursing facilities bring down health care costs, because they serve patients who are not sick enough to require the services of a full-service hospital.

The hospital’s arthritis center, where 100 people go each month for therapy, support groups and exercise, will be moved to a new site at Ventura Boulevard and Shirley Avenue in Tarzana, Green said.

Lona MacMonagle, an arthritis patient, said she travels from Burbank to Encino three times weekly for therapy at the arthritis center, and that the trip to Tarzana will be difficult.

“This is already a far piece for me to come,” MacMonagle said.