Supervisors View Options if Hospital Plan Is Stalled

Faced with the threat of a voter referendum, Ventura County officials said Thursday that they may be forced to look for alternatives to a $28.7-million public hospital project in order to keep the institution running.

If necessary, Supervisor Maggie Kildee said, the county could use portable buildings to house the Ventura County Medical Center’s kitchen and medical laboratory, rather than constructing new buildings as planned.

Or, Kildee said, the county could build a structure to house one facility and use portables for the other.

“Maybe we can build a kitchen and finance it ourselves,” she said. “We have to do something in order to keep our accreditation.”

Neighboring Community Memorial Hospital has launched a voter referendum drive to block the county hospital project, which it sees as the first phase of a larger expansion plan aimed at drawing its patients away.

If the nonprofit private hospital collects the necessary 24,065 signatures in the next 30 days, the project would be halted until June 1998, which is the soonest the referendum could be placed on the ballot, county officials said.

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Supervisor Frank Schillo agreed with Kildee that the county cannot wait two years to take care of its construction problems. He said that the hospital’s kitchen and laboratory have so many structural problems that they could be shut down and the hospital’s license revoked. He said the laboratory is so cramped that employees have a hard time moving around.

“We can’t wait until June of 1998,” he said. “We would have lost our accreditation by that point. We need to get something started. Maybe we could contract with a private company to provide our lab services.”

Still, Schillo and Kildee said any alternatives would be more expensive to taxpayers because the county would have to finance the entire project without the use of state and federal grants as now proposed.

The county’s current plan, unveiled last week, calls for a new kitchen, laboratory and three-story parking garage.

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Last March, voters rejected by a near 2-1 margin a proposed $56-million project that included a five-story outpatient center along with the kitchen, lab and parking garage.

Community Memorial representatives have argued that the new project is unnecessary and financially risky.

They said they believe that the development is only the beginning of a larger hospital expansion that they see as a threat to their business.

The Board of Supervisors next week is expected to call for a countywide health forum that would include public and private health care providers to discuss how all parties can work together.