Supervisors OK Hospital Compromise

The county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday formally declared peace in its epic, internecine battle over the size of County-USC Medical Center by agreeing to a deal with state legislators to build a hospital in Baldwin Park.

“I think we’ve arrived at a very good solution and one we can carry out effectively,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said.

But even in ceremonially approving the compromise, the board was riven by the political schisms and disagreements over health policy that had created the hospital dispute.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who had not been told of last week’s eleventh-hour negotiations between other supervisors and the state legislators who for three years pushed for a larger County-USC, blasted the deal as “a budget-buster.”

“This is a bad case of trichinosis,” said Antonovich, deriding as a pork barrel project the $47-million deal to build an 80-bed San Gabriel Valley hospital to supplement the operations of a slimmer County-USC, which is in Boyle Heights.

The motion by Burke and Supervisor Gloria Molina to endorse the deal passed 3 to 1 with Antonovich opposed. In keeping with the terms of the bill that is expected to be signed by Gov. Gray Davis, the board’s action was largely a symbolic measure directing county staff to help the state find a way to finance one-quarter of the new hospital before the county buys the Baldwin Park property and begins construction.

The supervisors’ 1997 decision to rebuild the quake-damaged Boyle Heights facility at 600 beds rather than the 750 that the health department initially recommended enraged Molina, in whose district it lies, and Eastside legislators who represent the vast area the hospital serves.

Supervisors were under orders from the federal government, which has bailed out the county’s troubled health system, to focus on outpatient care rather than the expensive hospitals that had nearly bankrupted the county. But Molina, legislators and many health experts warned that the facility could not serve the county’s massive uninsured population--although the health department ultimately found that a 600-bed hospital would be large enough.

Legislators held up $200 million that would have been used to build the hospital. Supervisors vowed to move ahead anyway. But last year they offered a compromise devised by Molina--to keep County-USC at 600 beds but to build a 60-bed annex at the site of a shuttered nonprofit hospital in Baldwin Park.

Ultimately, the county agreed to an additional 20 beds to bring the size of the hospital to 80, but only if the state would pay for those extra beds.

And in the final hours of the legislative session last week, that deal was formalized with a bill written by Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), who has long wanted to end the feud.

Although he had supported the 80-bed offer last year, Antonovich on Tuesday said the situation has changed.

The county faces hundred-million-dollar deficits in its health department in three years and cannot afford a new project, he said.

But county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said the anticipated state release of the $200 million in construction funds will balance out the cost of building the hospital.

Burke apologized for not informing Antonovich of the negotiations, saying that she had left a telephone message but may not have been specific enough.

“You have served in the Legislature,” former Assemblywoman Burke said to former Assemblyman Antonovich. “You surely know that most of the decisions made by the California Legislature are made in the last three or four hours.”

Molina, whose relations with her colleagues were strained by the lengthy hospital battle, said she was satisfied with the deal.

“It doesn’t meet all the needs of my constituents, but compromises are compromises and you don’t always get what you want,” she said.

Her frequent opponent during the hospital debate, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, praised the deal but said it should not distract the county from focusing on outpatient care in clinics rather than hospitals.

“Our failure to deliver outpatient services far exceeds whatever shortcomings we have with inpatient,” Yaroslavsky said.