U.S. May Halt Funds for New County-USC

Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency have become so concerned with the county Board of Supervisors’ delays and political squabbling over how to replace the earthquake-damaged County-USC Medical Center that they are threatening to withhold some or all of the nearly $500 million in aid promised for the project.

“The funding was provided to them over a year ago,” said FEMA’s federal coordinating officer for the project, Leland R. Wilson. “I think a year is more than fair to expect some good progress on such a large project.”

But nearly four years after the Northridge earthquake severely damaged the mammoth Eastside medical center, the county hasn’t even decided how many beds it wants to include in a replacement facility.

Nor has it begun the process of drawing up architectural and engineering plans, despite a Jan. 17, 1998, deadline for completing the hospital project. “I am just very concerned,” said Wilson, adding that FEMA Director James Lee Witt has been pressing him for answers “every time I go to Washington.”

“We are trying to wrap this disaster up and not just start getting things under construction,” said Wilson, who is temporarily based in Pasadena to oversee the entire $7-billion-plus earthquake recovery effort. “This disaster money is for disasters, and it should be used expeditiously and to get things prepared so they can be ready for the next one.”

FEMA’s warnings have rattled county officials, who acknowledge that it will be impossible to build the new hospital--which could cost as much as $1 billion--without significant help from Washington.

Few county officials believe that FEMA will withhold the promised $481 million. They are seriously concerned, however, about what county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen described in a recent memo as the “something in between” scenario, in which FEMA’s staff sets an extremely tight completion deadline for the project, and then refuses to release any federal money unspent by that point--or to pay any costs incurred after that date.

Wilson confirmed that FEMA will set “a very tight time frame” for completion of the project, and that if county officials don’t meet the deadline, in the absence of “extremely compelling extenuating circumstances, . . . they will have to finish the project with their own money.”

Janssen issued another dire warning to the supervisors: “Further, if [the] project is not completed, no federal funding will be provided for that project at all.”

FEMA, in fact, has told the county that the agency is concerned about the county’s lack of progress on many of its quake-related restoration efforts. But it is especially dismayed about the County-USC replacement project, given the medical center’s size and importance.

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In a letter to state officials in August, Wilson warned that FEMA will be extremely hesitant even to grant the county any more time to make up its mind. “Delays due to master plan development, disagreements within governing boards, inefficient business practices and other non-FEMA-related delays are not acceptable as extenuating circumstances for schedule extensions,” Wilson wrote.

FEMA’s growing impatience is likely to hasten the long-awaited showdown over County-USC, the busiest public hospital in the United States. It promises to be a bruising political battle, with the supervisors so far unable to agree on many issues--especially the new facility’s number of beds.

“We are under the gun,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina, whose Eastside district includes the medical complex. “We need to make a decision soon.”

Molina said she hopes to force the board to do so at its Nov. 12 meeting.

In the meantime, she is mounting a furious campaign, both in behind-the-scenes political meetings and in public, to get her colleagues to support a replacement facility with 750 beds.

Molina also has enlisted the help of a broad coalition of local Latino lawmakers from Sacramento and Washington in her campaign, as well as county Health Services Director Mark Finucane and others who support a 750-bed hospital.

All of them have said the medical center must be built with at least that many beds, since the hospital now treats 850 or more patients every day.

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In addition, they say the center must be built to last well into the 21st century and to accommodate a growing number of poor and uninsured patients, who will require medical attention at a public health facility.

So far, none of Molina’s four board colleagues have publicly supported such a large hospital.

Conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich has said that he favors spending only as much money as FEMA will pay for a new medical center. That amounts to a 350-bed facility, and Antonovich wants other patients farmed out to the many private-sector hospitals in the area that are now half empty.

Although Antonovich says such privatization efforts could save the county considerable money, Molina points to a recent study indicating that such “contracting out” efforts may not be cost-effective for the county.

FEMA officials, meanwhile, say that the county has had plenty of time to figure out what to do and that it needs to act.

They note that UCLA Medical Center received $492 million in disaster-recovery funding at the same time the county got its money more than a year ago. But while the county hasn’t even gone to the drawing board, Wilson said, UCLA has hired its architects and engineers, and produced scale models of its replacement facility.

As the political process heats up, county officials are frantically trying to draw up an official request for yet another time extension from FEMA. The original deadline for finishing the project was 18 months after the earthquake zone was declared a disaster area by Washington; the county sought and received a 30-month extension.

But that extension ends Jan. 17--four years to the day after the earthquake--when the county must seek another one. Although Wilson said that extension probably will be approved, he added that the federal government is losing its patience and will demand the kind of specific information that proves the county has begun the replacement effort in earnest.

“There is a lot of work the county needs to do,” Wilson said.

The supervisors did approve a 946-bed facility in 1990, but county officials acknowledged Wednesday that they will probably have to scrap those plans when they begin drawing up blueprints for a new, smaller hospital.

“We’ll really need some pros to come in here and take a look,” said Sharon Yonashiro, manager of the county’s Disaster Assistance Team. “You can’t just take some floors off the top.

“But we’re hopeful that if we can show a program that has [made] progress, that that will go a long way toward addressing their concerns,” she said.

Asked if that will be sufficient, Yonashiro said: “It will have to be enough. . . . We will have to go to them with a plan, a timetable.”