Panel OKs Helipad on Expanded Hospital Garage : Ventura: Some neighbors say they will gladly endure chopper noise in return for places to park their cars on their own streets.

Plans to cap the garage at Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital with two more floors of parking and a landing pad for emergency helicopters won approval Tuesday evening from the Ventura Planning Commission.

The 186-space addition to the two-story garage on Loma Vista Road is scheduled to be completed by February.

The commission voted 7 to 0 to approve the addition.

Word of the proposal Tuesday afternoon pleased some residents of neighborhoods surrounding the hospital, who said their otherwise quiet streets often are jammed with traffic and parked cars belonging to patients and hospital employees.

Some said they would welcome an occasional helicopter overhead, as long as they have more room on their streets to park their own cars.

The helipad would be used only for emergency aircraft flying trauma patients to and from the hospital, and not as a base for aircraft, hospital officials have said.

Sound engineers have told hospital administrators that the helicopters, flying over residential neighborhoods northwest and southeast of the helipad, would create no more noise than the ambulances and heavy trucks already operating around the hospital.

The helipad would be the second one operating in the neighborhood. A helipad at Ventura County Medical Center, less than a mile east on Loma Vista Road, receives emergency room patients from helicopters operated by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and by ambulance companies.

The new pad would be the second major, ongoing construction project near the hospital. A 75,000-square-foot, five-story medical office building being built next door on Brent Street is scheduled to be completed by year’s end, hospital officials said.

The proposed structure’s main purpose is to provide parking for the hospital’s 900 to 1,000 hospital employees, for people visiting the 160 inpatients and for the 125 outpatients who enter the hospital each day.

“There’s just a lot of traffic,” said Ken Strople, the hospital’s assistant executive director. “Plus, you’ve got to understand there’s a lot of visitors, and somebody has to drive Aunt Mary in here to get her chest X-ray.”

Some neighbors of the hospital welcomed the plan Tuesday.

Clyde Woolley, a retired plumbing contractor, has lived in the neighborhood since his house was built in 1946.

He said most curbside parking along Virginia Drive is taken up by motorists visiting the hospital or nearby clinics, forcing many of his neighbors and their visitors to park their cars on their own property.

“All the parking that’s right here is part of the clinic,” Woolley said, pointing at the rows of cars lining the shady street.

“It’s convenient having a hospital right there, but you get burned out on everybody and their mother parking on our street,” said Rhonda Michel, an escrow company employee who also lives on Virginia Drive.

The emergency helipad did not seem to faze Joe Garcia, a retired county equipment operator who has lived on Virginia Drive since 1970.

“I look at it this way: Somebody needs it. It might be me,” he said. “And how often does it happen?”

Another Virginia Drive resident, a physician who identified himself only as Frank, said: “If it saves somebody’s life, then it’s fine by me. It can’t be any worse than the ambulances starting up every five minutes at all hours of the night.”

Strople said helicopters will land at Community Memorial Hospital at least 12 times a month.

Mary Coontz, a longtime Virginia Drive resident, shrugged off the helipad as another symptom of the development that has taken place around the hospital since its construction in the 1960s.

“I lived in Ventura before all this, so I’m not too happy about it,” said Coontz, a retired letter carrier. “Congestion is in Ventura now, and that’s life. What are you gonna do? If you want to live here, you adjust.”