Free Clinic Sets Its Sights on a Bigger Expansion Project

After raising the money to renovate and build a much-needed addition to the Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic, clinic officials have decided instead to add a second building nearby.

The move to construct a second building will delay the expected completion of expansion by nearly a year, to August, 1993. But it will provide significantly more room than originally imagined without disrupting operations at the clinic’s cramped quarters at 3324 Sunset Blvd., development director Felix Racelis said.

Since announcing the capital campaign in late 1990, clinic officials have raised more than $460,000 to add a second floor and renovate the busy nonprofit clinic, last renovated in 1980. That project was to have been completed this year.

But in December, a property only two doors away went up for sale and the clinic bought it for $160,000. The lot is now the proposed site for a building that would house the clinic’s counseling work, its Cara a Cara Latino AIDS project, support groups for HIV-positive clients and administrative offices.

Clinic officials are constantly struggling to find ways to handle the more than 28,000 patient visits a year in the existing 5,400-square-foot building, Racelis said. The clinic also rents office space in a former factory across the street. He said the clinic lacks adequate space for medical examinations and storage of donated medical supplies and equipment. Work space is also cramped for the more than 200 volunteers who are crucial to the clinic’s treatment of poor patients from Silver Lake, East Hollywood, Echo Park, Pico-Union and elsewhere.

“The bottom line here is we’ll be able to provide more services for our community,” executive director Teresa Padua said.

Plans call for a three-story, 3,500-square-foot building and parking area on the recently purchased lot, plus repairs and a modest renovation to the existing clinic building, which is believed to have been built in the 1940s. The initial renovation plans would have added 2,239 square feet. Total costs, including purchase of the lot, are estimated at $840,000.

Clinic fund-raisers are optimistic that they can raise the remaining $380,000 needed from private foundations and businesses in time to start building by December.

The initial $460,000 capital fund included grants totaling $325,000 from the Los Angeles Community Development Department and the California Department of Health Services, plus grants from the Weingart Foundation and other private foundations.

The clinic’s annual budget of $1 million comes 85% from city, state and federal grants and the rest from private foundations.

Though an acute need for more space was evident years ago, Padua said, the recent riots created significant new demand for the clinic’s counseling services among poor people who lost jobs when workplaces were torched.

The move also would free up space in the existing building for the clinic’s major work--medical care--and for community health education programs, HIV testing, and a medical outreach program for the homeless that is now centered in a 5-by-6-foot cubicle, she said. The renovation, expected to begin this summer, will include conversion of two offices that would bring the number of available medical examination rooms to seven.

The clinic also offers legal help and plans to launch a new community health education program in July that would be housed in the existing building.

The Hollywood Sunset clinic’s services are free, though patients are encouraged to make donations. Services are provided by staffers, volunteer health professionals and interns.

Racelis said that a second building would raise the profile of the clinic in a neighborhood where widespread poverty already has made the clinic a well-used facility.

“We have the plans. They’re pretty much set--we just need some final approvals from our building committee,” Padua said. “All we need is money.”